Liberty and the Search for Identity 9789633863633

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LIBERTY AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

LIBERTY AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires

Edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes

Central European University Press Budapest New York

©2005 by Iván Zoltán Dénes Published in 2005 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: [email protected] The publication of the present volume was supported by the Committee of Philosophy of the Section of Philosophy and Historical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Translation editing was financed by the István Bibó Center for Advanced Studies. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 963 7326 44 8 cloth 978-963-7326-44-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liberty and the search for identity : liberal nationalisms and the legacy of empires / edited by Iván Z. Dénes. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 9637326448 1. Nationalism—Europe—History—Case studies. 2. Liberalism—Europe— History—Case studies. I. Dénes, Iván Zoltán. II. Title. JC311.L56 2005 320.54'094—dc22 2005021604 Printed in Hungary by Akaprint Nyomda

To the memory of István Bibó, political thinker, democrat, European and Hungarian patriot (Budapest, 1911–1979)

Contents

Michael Freeden: Foreword Editor’s Preface

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Iván Zoltán Dénes: Liberalism and Nationalism: An Ambiguous Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I. WESTERN EUROPE 1. David McCrone: Scotland and England: Diverging Political Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Richard J. Finlay: Radical Liberalism and Nationalism in Mid-Victorian Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Henk te Velde: Dutch Liberals and Nineteenth-Century National Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Janet Polasky: Liberal Nationalism and Modern Regional Identity: Revolutionary Belgium, 1786–1830 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 37 55 75

II. CENTRAL EUROPE 1. Gábor Erdôdy: Unity or Liberty? German Liberalism Founding an Empire, 1850–1879 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Albert Tanner: Switzerland: A European Model of Liberal Nationalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Vilmos Heiszler: The Identity Problems of the Austro-German Liberals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Iván Zoltán Dénes: Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives before 1848 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Miklós Szabó: The Liberalism of the Hungarian Nobility, 1825–1910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Maciej Janowski: Marginal or Central? The Place of the Liberal Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Polish History . . . . 7. Otto Urban: Czech Liberalism, 1848–1918 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91 109 139 155 197 239 273

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III. EASTERN EUROPE, THE BALKANS AND SOUTHERN EUROPE 1. Miklós Kun: The Inherent Burden of Russian Liberalism . . . . 2. Alexander Semyonov: Empire and Nation in Russian Liberal Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Imre Ress: The Value System of Serb Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . 4. Daniel Barbu–Cristian Preda: Building the State from the Roof Down: Varieties of Romanian Liberal Nationalism . . . . . 5. Diana Mishkova: The Interesting Anomaly of Balkan Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Eyüp Özveren: In Defiance of History: Liberal and National Attributes of the Ottoman-Turkish Path to Modernity . . . . . .

311 329 345 367 399 457

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503

Foreword

Boundaries are artificial things, yet we cannot do without them. Nationalism is an ideology of boundaries, while liberalism began as a challenger of social and intellectual constraints. Boundaries hold things constant; they protect; and they also appropriate. For some of the ends of liberalism that, too, is crucial: drafting constitutions that define powers and rights, enabling the expression of a popular will, carving out a common space for individuals who claim mutual affinity. But we are now witnessing an era in which boundaries are increasingly there to be dismantled, reorganized, and made more permeable. Liberalism has been centrally involved in, and profoundly influenced by, that reconstitution of political boundaries. At the same time, the rigidities of analyzing political thinking have altered dramatically, resulting in the reassessment of intellectual boundaries. A view of liberalism as a complex and mutating set of beliefs has emerged, in which universal aspirations jostle against the furtherance of particular preferences and differences, while ideologies—rather than perceived as dogmatic and doctrinaire—are understood to be in a continuous state of flux and reconfiguration. These developments are brought out in the essays in this valuable book, studies through which local liberalisms and local nationalisms are explored in a manner that extensively refines our understanding of their joint encounters, their overlaps and their peculiarities. Nationalism was invented in Europe and Europe was nearly annihilated by its own creation. Nationalism is now experiencing a revival but, in view of past experience, it needs to be civilized through re-injection with liberal substance, and nineteenth century thinking and practices may serve as a partial source for that cross-fertilization. But liberalism itself is now a reconstituted ideology that has moved on since its past heyday. We can speak of a liberalism of personal freedoms, rights and self-government, as distinct from a liberalism of cultural, ethnic and local expression, of identity and uniqueness. All those themes pervade this book. Liberalism has throughout its history sought to balance and articulate issues encapsulated in concepts such as liberty, class and classlessness, free trade, democracy and restricted power, citizenship, internal and external group self-determination, progress,

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reason, individualism, civilization, and civil society. We now appreciate that these principles and ideas have competed internally within the family of liberalisms for priority and for their relative weighting vis-à-vis each other. Nationalism occasionally coalesced with or nested within those host ideas, but it also occasionally resisted them, or some of them. The specific attraction of these essays is in their examination of liberalism from the vantage point of Europe’s geographical centre of gravity. What has been generally assumed to be a West European doctrine has undergone mutations and variations throughout Europe. Not infrequently, nationbuilding, attached to its more common end of political emancipation, gave liberalism a function it rarely had in the West, where independent nation states preceded the emergence of liberal theories. The intricacy of liberalism has permitted many usages. While ethically liberalism has been a civilizing force, economically and politically it could be harnessed as a modernizing force, particularly when the liberal faith in progress was reformulated as modernization. The translation of its universalism into free trade, however, accomplished more dubious results. Free trade’s equalizing and liberating tonic was soured by frequent attempts to reduce liberalism to a narrow economic, capitalist doctrine that oversaw much human misery and dehumanization. In this connection, the link between nation and state played a remarkable counterbalancing role. While liberalism was generally wary of the state as a wielder of excessive power and an intervener in private domains of self-development, moderate types of nationalism suggested that the state could be used as a modernizing engine, as a repository of democratic practices, and as an enhancer of cultural identity, and thus serve liberal ends—though central and east European liberalisms did not follow the Western liberal formation of the welfare state as an antidote to liberalism’s association with crude capitalism. In many parts of Europe, and during much of the lifetime of liberalism, its European experience has not been a happy one. The trial and error experimentalism of European liberalisms has often been conducted from a position of political and ideological weakness and, significantly, the political space available for liberalism has differed notably from country to country: sometimes squeezed out by both left and right, at other times infusing political and philosophical practices that are more recognizable under other names. The collapse of most central and east European liberalisms by the late nineteenth century may be contrasted with its transformation in some Western countries, a transformation that was crucial to its future survival power. One lesson to be learnt from this collection of articles is that the fragmentation of liberal traditions in large parts of Europe needs to be reexamined in order to distil already existing liberalisms from the national cultures themselves. Indeed, the allure of mid-19th century romantic and passionate liberalism, adding an enlightened patriotism to the sensitivity to

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global injustice—in contrast to more recent, dryer and technical versions— suggests that liberalism needs to rediscover the political language through which it spread popular hope and inspiration. This rich volume contributes to that task, while attesting to the new kind of trans-European intellectual cooperation that is open, pluralist and self-critical—in short, that is itself quintessentially liberal. Michael Freeden University of Oxford

Editor’s Preface

In 1986 I was faced with the question of how to contextualize the topic of my research, which was the role and ideology of the Hungarian conservatives and their challengers, the liberals. With whom should they be compared? Obviously, the reference group could not be the English or the French, as the difference was so great as to make comparison nonsensical. The Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Italian and Greek liberal nationalists and conservatives—who encountered similar dilemmas to the protagonists of my researches, namely, the complex task of creating a middle-class society, a liberal nation state and national identity—were unknown to me. During my conversations with Isaiah Berlin at All Souls College in Oxford around that time, I broached this question. He encouraged me to compare the Hungarians with the Poles and Czechs, with Central and Eastern Europeans. I realized that this was a pioneering task beyond the capabilities of a single person and it would be necessary to collaborate with many scholars in order to conduct a comparison. I began this collective intellectual undertaking in Budapest where I persuaded several colleagues each to elaborate a theme. Ferenc Huoranszki volunteered to interpret the theoretical sources of German liberalism. Gábor Erdôdy summed up the findings of researchers studying nineteenth-century German liberalism, which was little known in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s. Vilmos Heiszler explained the identity dilemmas of Austrian German liberals; Miklós Szabó described and interpreted the character of the Hungarian nobility’s liberalism; András Keszthelyi reviewed the peculiarities of Romanian liberalism; Miklós Kun summarized the handicaps of Russian liberalism; Imre Ress described the liberalism of the Serbs. I undertook to elaborate the pre-1848 Hungarian liberalism and conservativism. I soon realized that a profound knowledge of Czech and Polish liberalism was indispensable, and local specialists would have to be approached in order to analyze those areas. In Prague, Otto Urban and in Warsaw, Maciej Janowski undertook the task in 1988. As a result, the manuscript was completed in Hungarian in 1990 and the volume was eventually published three years later, under the title: Szabadság és nemzet. Liberalizmus és nacionalizmus Közép- és Kelet-

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Európában [Liberty and Nation. Liberalism and Nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe]. The book contained the above studies plus one completed before publication, that by Imre Szilágyi, a summary of Slovenian liberalism. As work progressed, we realized that what we were doing was not comparison but preparing the ground for such a task. It also became clear that for analogies to Central and Eastern European liberal nationalisms we had to look to Western and Northern Europe, and partly to Southern Europe. I made up my mind to persuade foreign colleagues to map the specifics of local liberal nationalisms. By 1996, the raft of studies had been extended to include Henk te Velde’s paper on Dutch liberalism, Janet Polasky’s writing on Belgian liberalism and a study of Turkish liberalism written by Eyüp Özveren. Now international conferences could be convened at Budapest to thrash out the studies written in or translated into English. We hoped that the studies would soon be published in an English volume. However, the publisher’s editor who had originally been interested in the book changed jobs and the manuscript was left to gather dust. In the second half of the decade I managed to persuade two Scottish colleagues, David McCrone from Edinburgh and Richard Finlay from Glasgow, to interpret the links between Scottish liberalism and nationalism. The Swiss case study by Albert Tanner did not merely extend the line of Central European case studies but also shed light on them from a new perspective, while the paper by Alexander Semyonov from St. Petersburg was a new addition to the East European section. We did not succeed in tackling all the liberal nationalisms in Europe. For one thing, early on, the project lacked institutional, hence financial backing. I failed to induce scholars to contribute serious studies about the Irish, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese liberal nationalisms. At the same time, I came to realize that what we had written in the late 80’s was partly outdated, and hence the authors would have to reconsider their texts. The manuscript was again submitted to a publisher and fortunately we received valuable suggestions from reviewers which helped us improve our texts. By now it was already 2001. The intellectual trends from which we had started our project had already changed. In scholarly discourse, center vs. periphery, civilized empire vs. tribal nationalism were replaced by other paradigms, which offered more differentiated approaches to the national issue and collective identity, which became predominant. Moreover, the work to be done had become increasingly more complex. The reviewers’ comments made several of us rewrite or modify our studies. Last year I submitted the revised and abbreviated manuscript, which included a Balkan comparative study by Diana Mishkova, to the publisher. On the very day when I am writing this preface yet another study arrived presenting the case of Romanian liberal nationalism written by Daniel Barbu and Cristian Preda. The reader is now holding the version which includes the latest recommendations of a new reviewer. The book is

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only indirectly connected to the philosophical and political science discourses on the same theme identified with the names of Yael Tamir, Will Kymlicka and János Kis, since its main objective is the exploration of the similarities and dissimilarities in Central and Eastern European liberal nationalisms, their reference to Western and Southern Europe and the preparation of the necessary comparison in case studies. I recall the memory of Isaiah Berlin (Riga, 1909–Oxford, 1997) with gratitude. Although he did not bequeath large monographs to posterity, his essays, lectures, ideas, insights and lucidity inspired many of us, including those of us who worked on this path-breaking project. I bow my head on behalf of the co-authors of the volume to the memory of Professor Otto Urban (1938–1996) and remember with deep affection Miklós Szabó (1935–2000), historian and political thinker, whom many of us looked upon as our mentor in political thought and who was an autonomous and courageous person. I am indebted to Professor James J. Sheehan, my Fulbright tutor at Stanford in 1990/91, whose suggestions put to paper in 2001 were highly instructive and contributed largely to the improvement of the volume. I also owe a word of gratitude to the anonymous reader who inspired me to reconsider the theoretical relation between liberalism and nationalism four years ago. I am grateful to Professor Gábor Vermes, the publisher’s reviewer of the present version, for his correct, thorough, detailed recommendations made this spring. I am sure they largely promoted the professional level and readability of the volume. Evidently, a greater part of the texts had to be translated. If they are readable, it is mainly to the credit of translator Judit Pokoly and copy editor David Robert Evans—our thanks go to them. Most of my thanks are, however, due to my co-authors. To those who have been on my side for nearly twenty years or participated in it in some phases; to those who had the patience both to correct their texts and to wait for the co-ordination of the different texts and the publication of the volume. Naturally, I understand those, too, who had no patience to wait so long. Luckily, those were the exceptions. Special thanks are due to my colleague and friend, Balázs Trencsényi for his encouragement and help. Eventually the material had to be reduced by half so that it could literally be held in the hand. I do hope that the book will be of use to teachers and students, historians, political scientists and philosophers, and to experts on Central and Eastern Europe, liberalism and nationalism on all five continents. Last, but not least, I should like to remember my intellectual father, István Bibó (1911– 1979), the most outstanding democratic political thinker in twentieth-century Hungary. I dedicate this book to his memory. Budapest, 31 May 2005

Iván Zoltán Dénes

Liberalism and Nationalism: An Ambiguous Relationship IVÁN ZOLTÁN DÉNES

I. Liberty and the search for identity, especially liberalism and nationalism, had an ambiguous relationship during the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At first, liberalism and nationalism were almost inseparable, then opposed, even locked in an irreconcilable confrontation. Liberalism and nationalism both had and have ambiguous meanings. Liberalism was an ideology and a political party to defend or establish constitutionalism against absolutism during most of the nineteenth century. At the same time it was a program to create a modern, progressive, civilized European middle class society opposing social backwardness and the privilege-system. One of its main goals was to create an independent, strong nation-state in order to form a modern middle class society. These three different meanings were interlinked and had a common function of presenting the future vision of the political community. As a political ideology, movement and party of constitutionalism, middle class society and nation-state, liberals had represented the national party constructing modern national culture and identity. Later on, at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries and afterward, the meaning of liberalism had been reduced to the party of modernity. Nowadays it has almost the same meaning. Nationalism, as we know, has several different contradictory meanings. First of all, it means patriotism, namely somebody’s feeling for and loyalty to his/her family, village, town, county and country, fatherland, patria. Another meaning is the intellectuals’ program of the nation-making process, forging the nation by ideology, culture, common emotional experiences, inventing and creating a common national identity. At the same time it denotes the process itself. Last, but not least nationalism in the narrow sense of the word designates an ideology of exclusion and implicit aggression. Yael Tamir, János Kis and Will Kymlicka have interpreted the link between liberalism and identity not as a result of divine grace, history, tradition, ethnicity and the state, but a deliberate choice by the individual. In their interpretations the basis for individuals belonging somewhere and having different identities, is voluntary. Liberalism is the precondi-

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tion, whereas identities, including the national one, are the choice of free individuals living in a free society. Liberalism and nationalism had a common enemy during the first part of the nineteenth century: absolutism. Their opponents had changed during the twentieth century and up to this very day. They are often in confrontation, and sometimes became mutually hostile. The anti-liberal discourses in Central and Eastern Europe, both that of the interwar ethno-cultural political language, twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and also the post-communist revival of ethno-cultural anti-liberal discourses, depicted liberalism as the devil, the scapegoat. In turn sometimes the liberals stigmatized nationalism as Satan.

II. In the predominant type of political discourse in the twentieth century in the interwar years, liberalism became stigmatized in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal as anti-national. It was claimed that liberalism opposed national traditions, lacked roots, imitated foreign models, served foreign interests, ran counter to national identity, even totally undermined it. That was not only the creed of the advocates of anti-liberal ideologies and their audiences, but the anti-liberals’ image of their liberal foes also had its impact upon the latter. Especially because at that time they were no longer national liberals (more precisely: liberal nationalists), and the ethno-cultural language in which the discourse took shape was alien to them (at least far more unfamiliar to them than to their antagonists). On the issues of national traumas and the ensuing political hysteria, they were forced on the defense. The ideologues formulated the political questions in the terminology of political romanticism, in ethno-cultural terms. Thus, the liberals increasingly displayed the characteristics of the stigmatized. In the new political language of national collectivism and the mythology of the class struggle of the totalitarian systems, liberalism and the liberals were branded as significant forces in opposition to the nation and progress, respectively. Liberalism became a term of abuse, and— with the exception of a brief episode—we are shocked to realize that it has become a blasphemous term again after 1989–90. True, this strain is not as generally accepted today as during the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. One finds that in political discourse liberty and nation, adoption of European models and national self-centeredness, modernity and tradition, globalization and identity are pitted against each other. Rather like the advocates of progress and nation, the Cosmopolitans and the Patriots

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were opposed during the reigns of Joseph II, Catherine the Great, and Frederick the Great. The new liberals themselves have an ambiguous attitude to their liberal nationalist predecessors. On the one hand, they feel, perhaps with good reason, more closely associated with the legacy of liberalism divorced from nationalism (Oszkár Jászi and the civic radicals in Hungary, Emmanuel Rádl and his followers in Bohemia, the activists of “organic work” in Poland, and the liberals in the interwar period throughout Central and Eastern Europe) than with the liberal nationalist tradition. On the other hand, (after the heady experience of 1989/90) the nation has acquired very negative connotations for them, not quite unrelated to its expropriation by the power technicians of the political right. Moreover, all this remains suppressed and unarticulated in a “favorable international environment” for liberalism.

III. Is it inevitable in Central and Eastern Europe to have to choose between binary forms of political discourses as modernity vs. tradition, “Western, cosmopolitan civilization” vs. “national identity?” Are we bound to the false alternatives of “artificial” vs. “natural” development, imitation vs. uniqueness, “adoption of the European model” vs. “national self-centeredness”? Is there an unavoidable dichotomy of the “original” economic, social, and political backwardness and a mission of some national Sonderweg indirectly offering cures for the “West”? Obviously, these are false alternatives, and their underlying assumptions about “West” and “East,” cosmopolitan civilization and national identity, European and national missions were connected to special situations, processes of socialization, and political discourses. Both were parts of the intellectual and emotional heritage of enlightened absolutism bequeathed to its products, especially the “intelligentsia.” Subsequently, as an outcome of autocratic and totalitarian regimes, these dichotomies were revived as alternative forms of indoctrination. Opposed though similarly unproductive, they mark attempts to create identity in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the catchwords of progress and motherland, like eighteenth century Polish reformers of noble rank, several German, Italian and Hungarian intellectuals first opted for the needs of civilization and progress as contrasted with national affinities, having identified national tradition with backwardness. By contrast, many advocates of loyalty to the national tradition and the motherland rejected the role of the “Cosmopolitans” and the innovations called for by progressivists as safeguards of privileges. Some of them quickly realized that the best protection of constitutionalism against the absolutist peril was the extension

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of personal liberty and political freedom to the unprivileged. These were some of the antecedents of liberal nationalisms representing different percepts, dilemmas, and heritages in Central and Eastern Europe. The liberals’ images of “self ” and “other” were determined by the dichotomies of constitutionalism vs. absolutism, progress vs. backwardness (civilization vs. barbarism, West vs. East, virtue vs. corruption), patriotism vs. (often) loyalty to the empire, opinion vs. prejudice. Liberty and nation— liberalism and a critically interpreted national tradition—constituted a harmonious unity, until they rose to power, or, until it turned out that the nation was segmented in terms of society, nationality and religion. Apparently, the most sensitive area was the nationality issue (and in particular, the program of the homogeneous nation-state), which also determined the attitude to the federal solutions. All things considered, the liberals in this region appear to have been mostly liberal nationalists comparable to the Irish, Scottish, Norwegian, Belgian, Italian and Greek liberal nationalists. It was the legacy of the liberals’ promising attempt to secede from liberal nationalist discourse that could be acknowledged in good faith by the Central and Eastern European, first and foremost by Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Serbian and Romanian liberals in 1989/90. It is true that they still acknowledged the earlier liberal heritage as their own, making repeated attempts to do so ever since. However, the Hungarian liberal democratic philosopher, János Kis’ analysis shows far more similarities to Ronald Dworkin’s value judgments conceived in terms of “affirmative action” than to the ideas of the earlier Hungarian liberals.

IV. Etymologically speaking, political liberalism first cropped up in Napoleon Bonaparte’s brumaire declaration and grew into a political term of elaborate content in the Spanish party political struggles of the 1820s. We know that it designated the opponents of absolutism—the advocates of constitutionalism. The different kinds of enlightened absolutism, in turn, were not only opposed to backwardness but also to the privilege system, and to political representation of the privileged estates (Stände), while the liberals were heirs to the aristocratic constitutionalism. However, they had an ambiguous attitude to enlightened absolutism. Some were inspired by the enlightened and modernizing aspirations, while sooner or later they came into conflict with absolutism. Others drew on the fundamental values of various reformations and enlightenments. Summing up the context of the self-identification of North American, British and Dutch liberals prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century, one has to list, first of all: constitutionalism vs. absolutism, division of power by checks and balances vs. concentration of

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power, and the order of freedom vs. mob rule. Similarly their self-identification contained the realm of active individuals gathering in societies vs. brute violence, consensus vs. prejudice, individual merit vs. privilege, nonconformism vs. conformism, individuals vs. classes taken for castes, lay public administration vs. bureaucracy, and local autonomy vs. central control. The goal of their endeavor was this free congregation of virtuous citizens—a gathering identified in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe with the nation. In France, the centralized state was decisive in politics and political thinking before, during and after the revolution. The classics of the French liberals, such as Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, defined their position in opposition to it. By contrast, in Germany the unified and constitutional state was not a reality but a program for the future. Here the liberals’ self-definition also included their ambivalence towards enlightened absolutism. Setting a modernizing state against backwardness, a unified state against dismemberment on the one hand, and defending the autonomous individual against the paternalistic state, on the other. The liberals were committed to liberal constitutionalism, and thus, drawing closer to their American, English and French predecessors, they set about reinterpreting and transforming small circles of aristocratic liberties to modern freedom. In these countries, the foes of absolutism and promoters of constitutionalism did not seek to emancipate an existing middle-class society from the excessive domination of the state, but to build it out of nothing. In order to integrate a rising middle-class to become the core of a modern nation, the state was also necessary. What they needed was not an absolutist state, especially not the absolutist state of a foreign empire, but a state that could be the instrument of social development and national integration—a liberal constitutional nation-state. Their primary interpretation of liberty was personal freedom derived from the freedom of conscience and the habeas corpus—the possibility to act without external interference. First and foremost, it meant that man was not a bound slave but a free individual with unalienable rights to his body, soul and actions. That, in turn, required that he should not be kept under anyone’s thumb, his sovereignty being guaranteed by the maturity of his spirit and his financial independence. A free community is paramount for individual liberties. One that does not tolerate the yoke of a despot, one that refuses to be subjugated by either an external conqueror or the greedy moguls of the domestic arena, or again, by the mob. It is a community that is politically free, meaning that its members decide upon their individual and collective matters themselves. The “glorious past” of regnum and natio are reminiscent of the lost golden age. The desirable future to be created is founded on a precedent pro-

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jected into the past. This norm spells out what the political community should have been and should be like. It was influenced equally by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, Arthur Young, Friedrich List, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Rotteck-Welcker’s Staatslexikon, as well as the use and reinterpretation of the earlier political language and vocabulary. The vision of the desirable future and its archetype projected back into the past are created and interpreted by the intellectuals like István Bibó and Miroslav Hroch. The ardent work of scholars and intellectuals designates and creates the national themes, the active minority resolutely spreads them via nationwide agitation, as a result of which nationalism becomes a mass movement. The intelligentsia elevates high culture to the rank of canons, and orders about the population as its subject. It formulates and disseminates the program of becoming a nation. It lays claim to statehood on behalf of the nation, while the state, in turn, ensures its existence and rule over other nationalities. In the greater part of the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism, constitutionalism and national tradition, progress and identity were inter-referential, inseparable and often interchangeable concepts in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The subjects of the German and Italian small states were entitled to become German and Italian citizens, and the precondition for their personal and political freedom was the creation of a unified and constitutional Germany and Italy. Accordingly, personal liberty and the freedom of the political community, as well as the construction of a middle class society, a modern liberal nation and nation state were to replace backwardness, privileges by birth, segmentation and autocracy. It was the social, national and staterelated dilemmas that basically differentiated the citizens of the United States of America, Great Britain and the Netherlands from those in these European regions. In the United States of America, Great Britain and the Netherlands, middle-class society, the national identity that served to integrate it, local administration and the state that unites all these did exist or were in the making. Germany and Italy were still to be created from the disunited hyperaristocratic small states often controlled by despots. In many regards the situation was similar in the Hungarian Kingdom, the Czech Kingdom, in partitioned Poland, in Greece, in the Romanian principalities, the Serbian principality and Bulgaria. On the spectrum of European liberalisms and nationalisms, the place of those who represented the free property owners’ middle-class society or the aristocracy within independent, constitutional states were different from those who lived under foreign domination, often subjected to an absolutist empire. Among subjugated peoples the liberal nationalists forged the middle-class society as well as the independent constitution-

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al state. The conservatives, on the other side, had little to conserve in this situation. The ideology of the liberal nationalist program, and the lack of the national conservative role implied similar positions, outlooks and values among the German, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, Finnish, Irish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian liberals and conservatives. From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, especially in 1848, many Central and Eastern European countries showed mutual interaction between liberalism and nationalism. In 1917–18 the three old fashioned empires—the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian— disintegrated. Their different parts had become independent nation states including different nationalities. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, in every Central and Eastern European country the ethno-cultural approach, the anti-liberal discourse imbued with political romanticism and the myths of the national characteristics became prevalent, in which the cause of freedom and liberalism was set antagonistically against the cause of the political community and the nation. That was also the case in Southern Europe. Liberalism as the enemy of the nation—the cosmopolitan, alien, bolshevik, plutocratic and Jewish subversion from within—was the image in the ethno-cultural and anti-liberal discourse in the interwar period. It was conserved on the whole after 1945, with only some of its elements transformed and encoded. That applies to the countries subordinated to the Soviet Union, and—as it has turned out—something similar took place (though more indirectly) in Yugoslavia. In these countries both the personal liberty and the political freedom of the political community were suppressed by the totalitarian regimes, became taboos, relegated into the collective subconscious. Although the antitotalitarian revolutions of 1953, 1956, 1968, 1981 and 1989 represented the demand for freedom and the self determination of the individuals and their political communities, it was impossible to realize them before the weakening and crumbling and eventual dissolution of the last European empire, the Soviet Union. Since then liberalism and nationalism often have been antithetical concepts, enemy images of each other that cancel each other out in the discourse of the newly formed and consolidated liberal democracies.

V. In the 1990s we saw the dissolution of numerous multinational polities in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and the resumption of nationbuilding in many parts of these regions. These recent historical developments find their closest parallel in the gradual disintegration of the multi-ethnic imperial framework and the concomitant process of the

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emergence of nation-states that began in the 1820s and ended in the early 1920s. In order to render this process intelligible on a historical and a theoretical-conceptual plane, it is worthwhile to focus, amongst others, on the intricate relationship of two fundamental concepts of political modernity: liberty and nation. The main trend is that the liberals’ role had been changed from the representatives of the political community, its political freedom and identity, to that of modernity and defender of the rule of law and human rights. We are able to reconstruct and analyze their political vocabulary from the 1820s up till 1918. Without this critical analysis, it is impossible to describe current liberal terminology. How and why did the liberals move from the nation’s party to that of the “enemy” of the nation, from the most popular political actors to the great bogey? My answer is that independence, democracy, personal liberty and political freedom are not programs anymore, but legal realities. At the same time, all the awful consequences of the authoritarian and totalitarian periods are alive, unprocessed and unarticulated, poisoning the public and the private lives of the people. In this context, liberalism is readily tending towards plutocracy as the search for collective identity perverts itself, often becoming nationalism opposed to liberty and liberalism. Liberty and nation which were intertwined and almost inseparable in the first half of the nineteenth century, became opposed for many people in Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar period and after 1989–90. Defining the roots of this phenomenon is an obvious task, by comparing the history of this problem in this geographical region with Western, Eastern and Southern Europe. A way should be found to avoid the usual schematic models of the original backwardness of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the different romantic nationalistic Sonderwegs and their various national uniquiness mythologies. In this context it is inevitable, among others, to face up to the damnosa hereditas of the old fashioned empires, their heirs’ unsolved fundamental problems and their peoples’ unprocessed pains, fears and humiliations. They are alive, need processing and acknowledgement, or we might yet again suffer from their consequences. In order to understand them one needs to break with the traditional path of national histories, by digging out the suppressed heritage of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires, including their dissolutions. By reconstructing and analyzing the concepts of liberty and nation in their different contexts, we provide the opportunity to expose their meanings in different modernity and identity discourses in Central and Eastern Europe. On this basis it is possible to compare them to each other and to the main characteristics of similar discourses in other regions. This task requires an interdisciplinary approach to find the contexts of different speech acts, to understand their functions, to iden-

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tify the actors, to analyze their arguments, to reconstruct their motives, to outline their intellectual sources and to rethink the dynamics of the debates redefining their targets. Rival visions of modernity, alternative strategies for the future of the political communities, opposing inventories and concepts of the national past, and contradictory images of the self and the other are required. It is essential to discover the underlying assumptions of the various discourses in order to interpret them as different speech acts. All these interpretations had specific narratives of the past, definite visions of both internal and external enemies, often connected with conspiracy theories, glorification of either the aristocracy or, more often, the peasantry. They developed programs for forging national identity through collective actions; embracing ambiguous attitudes towards modernization; choosing between imitation and autarchy, European blueprints and national uniqueness, sometimes between plutocracy and mob rule. As far as liberalism is concerned, it would be preferable to have the plural, rather than the singular form using the unreflected English and/or French liberal canons for it. Nationalisms also had different contexts with separate meanings and distinct functions. There are enormous possibilities for their future comparisons. The book provides case studies which are preconditions for working out the comparative history of the European regions before, during and after the dissolution of the old fashioned empires. It concerns the various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. The book divides three geographical parts: Western, Central and East-Southern Europe. Each and all includes case studies on the various links between liberalism and national identity in different countries. David McCrone presents the divergence of English and Scottish nationalism discourses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Richard J. Finlay examines the link between liberalism and national identity in nineteenth century Scotland juxtaposing the different characteristics of Irish and Scottish politics and identity. Henk te Velde deals with the changing peculiarities both of Dutch liberalism and national identity. Janet Polasky interprets the relationship between bilingualism, different national identities and liberal nationalism in Belgium. Gábor Erdôdy surveys the conclusions of the German historiography of the 70s and 80s on German liberal nationalism in the process of the unification. Albert Tanner examines the connection between Swiss liberal nationalist politics and the process of creating national selfimages in Switzerland. It follows Vilmos Heiszler’s overview of the Austro-German liberals’ identity dilemmas and their background. My

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case study is a historical reconstruction and analysis of the political vocabularies of the pre -1848 Hungarian liberals and conservatives. An exceptional reading is the late Miklós Szabó’s original interpretation of Hungarian liberal nationalism by putting it into international context. Maciej Janowski interprets the various liberal groups’ attitudes toward progress and national unification in partitioned Poland. The last Central European case study is the late Otto Urban’s thematical analysis of the antecedents, the development and the characteristics of Czech liberal nationalism. Miklós Kun shows the problems of the awakening Russian liberalism. Alexander Semyonov reconstructs and interpretates the liberal concepts of empire and nation in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth century. Imre Ress outlines the main characteristics of nineteenth century Serbian liberalism and national identity in the context of nation-building. Daniel Barbu demonstrates the oligarchic peculiarities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Romanian liberal nationalist establishments, and his colleague, Cristian Preda reviews the post-communist liberalism. Diana Mishkova reconstructs, compares and contrasts the nineteenth century Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian liberal nationalisms. And lastly, Eyüp Özveren analyses the Turkish modernization process with special reference to the prospects of liberalism, the concepts of modernity, and the construction of a national identity. A follow-up edition would allow for an elaboration of further case studies.

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I. Western Europe

Scotland and England: Diverging Political Discourses DAVID MCCRONE

The late twentieth century has seen the growing divergence of Scotland and England in terms of political behavior. From 1979 until 1997, Scotland found itself governed by a political party—the Conservatives— which owed its electoral strength to support in England. It was not until the election of a Labour government in 1997—and the wipe-out of Conservative MPs in Scotland—that what became known as the ‘democratic deficit’ north of the border was addressed by proposals to set up a Home Rule parliament, albeit within the UK. Lying behind shifting electoral fortunes in the two countries, bound as they were within a unitary state, was a complex interaction of political discourses. The most straightforward interpretation is to argue that Scotland and England were always different in these respects: that the former was inherently left-of-center, and England the dominant—and rightist—partner in the Union. The temptation to essentialize differences in discourse in the two countries is understandable, but misguided. I will argue that this is to do violence to the complex and interactive histories of the two countries. In this paper I will review the history of the 1707 Union with particular regard to Scotland, and seek to show that, far from having a colonial status in that Union, it was an active participant and co-equal, if junior, partner. To simplify, we might say that the Union of 1707 which forged Great Britain—later the United Kingdom—was a ‘marriage of convenience’ for Scotland and England, and that it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that— for Scotland at least—the ‘contract’ was required to be redrawn if constitutional divorce was not to take place.

I. Three key events shaped eighteenth-century Scottish politics: the Union of 1707, the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and the British wars against France. These events and their consequences laid the basis for a politics that is recognizable to us today.

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The Union marked the end of the Scottish parliament, as it voted to dissolve itself into the new parliament of Great Britain. Two points are important for our purposes: that it took place, thus removing the legislature from Scotland, and that it left Scottish civil society more or less intact. Civil society can be thought of as those institutions that lie between the individual and the state. In Scotland, these were autonomous, and had roots stretching back to before the Union. Parliament in London kept out because, on the whole, it was not interested, unless there was a threat to the peace and security of Britain as a whole. Indeed, it was such a threat that led to the second key event, the defeat of the Jacobites. The Jacobite rising was the British instance of a Europe-wide civil war between Catholicism and Protestantism. The revolutions of 1688–90—peaceful in England, less so in Scotland, and bloody in Ireland—had secured the British monarchy for the Protestant cause, displacing the Catholic King James VII (known as James II in England). There were recurrent attempts in the first half of the eighteenth century to restore him, most of them supported by the Pope and by one or other of the continental Catholic powers, notably France and Spain. So, when the 1745 rising was thoroughly and ruthlessly crushed in 1746, a half-century of potential instability was at an end. What was at stake here was not merely the religion of the monarch. It was the preservation of the limited but real liberties which the 1690 settlement had secured. The values that became free trade, representative democracy, and pluralism were, on the whole, the preserve of the Protestant nations of Europe, amongst which Scotland was proud to count itself. The defeat of Jacobitism ensured that the British state would continue on the path along which it had been proceeding at least since the Union: the free market in trade, Protestantism in religion, and rationalism in social thought. All three of these were influential in the Scottish politics of the late eighteenth century. In defeating the Jacobites, the state was also striking a blow against their sometime sponsor, France. But from the middle of the eighteenth century, too, there was a series of wars directly against France. These started when that country was ruled by its ancien régime, and so the British role could be understood as a defense of liberty. After 1789, the liberty that was being defended was counterposed in British propaganda to the revolutionary terror of republican France. Either way, what mattered in Scotland was the unprecedented popularity which these wars gave to being British. A new patriotism was invented, one that fitted well with the rival national identity of Scotland because Britishness was so firmly grounded in Protestantism. To secure their Scottishness, it was believed, the Scots had to be British, because otherwise the central element of that Scottishness—their religion—would be endangered.

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While these foreign affairs were helping to secure Scottish politics in a British framework, the politics of Scottish civil society followed a course that was probably not much different from the direction that would have been followed had Scotland retained a parliament. Linking Scotland with London was the system of elite politics around the Scottish ‘manager,’ the man entrusted by the British government to co-ordinate the views of Scottish MPs, and to channel Scottish concerns to London. These elite activities had an impact on Scottish society through this patronage. But what mattered in shaping the lives of Scots was the selfgoverning local state: the independent Scottish Presbyterian church, the autonomous system of local government (burghs representing merchants and other professionals for urban areas and meetings of county landowners in the rural districts), and the separate Scottish legal system. These ran everything that, nowadays, we would call social policy— although, of course, the extent of government involvement was far less than in the twentieth century. The church, through the parish, governed the elementary schools and administered relief for the poor. The burghs regulated and promoted trade. The prominent landowners of the county saw to the upkeep of roads and bridges. They had few regular dealings even with the administration in Edinburgh, far less with distant London. The main contact with London was when the central government needed to raise special taxes for military purposes—a contact that served to emphasize that the London link was about foreign affairs only. This system of Scottish government was given ideological shape by the emerging ideas of rationality. It was believed that following reason in politics would produce a well-regulated society. It was also believed that reason was what made a polity civilized, and that the best guarantor of the rule of reason was the Protestant religion. Because England was regarded as the fount of reason and a bulwark of Protestantism, emulating that country became the major preoccupation of Scottish politicians, whether local or national. In their admiration for England, they were following a widespread European fashion, but they were also helping to shape it through the writings of the intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment: people such as the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith, the sociologist Adam Ferguson, and the historian William Robertson. At the same time, these people were also Scottish nationalists. They defended Scottish culture where it did not threaten the link with England, but the veneration for the Union was itself based on the more fundamental belief in reason. So it was not Englishness that was preferred to Scottishness, it was reason, and England was merely the means to that. The Scottishness that could be indulged in was sometimes political and sometimes religious: for example, Scotland’s control of its

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church or of its legal system. But the criterion that was invoked to decide what features of distinctive Scottish politics should be retained was whether distinctiveness would best permit the freedom of the Scots to pursue their own private concerns. For many matters, the model that seemed best able to achieve that was the English or—as the new state evolved—the British, and the old Scottish model retained its association with what was seen to be the unfree condition of the pre-Union era. The Scottishness that could be safely developed was precisely those areas of life that were not political. So eighteenth-century politics bequeathed four main things to the politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (i) a belief that political problems are amenable to rational solutions; (ii) a tendency to regard England as the fount of rational thought; (iii) the resultant view that the Union was the best way of defending Scottish political freedom, especially from enemies beyond Britain, many of whom were hostile to the Protestant religion; and (iv) a consigning of Scottish culture to the realm of the private and therefore of the non-political.

II. What did the Scottish constitution in the nineteenth century look like? The key point is that it was, above all, local. Local councils and the accompanying local and national boards ran the poor law, what there was of public health, and the asylums for lunatics. They managed the prisons and the police, and regulated housing. They were in charge of registering births, marriages, and deaths. And, by the end of the century, they had taken responsibility for elementary schools, agriculture, and the development of the Highlands. The councils of the large towns also, crucially, regulated trade. The people who staffed these councils and boards were the professional middle class, led by the lawyers and, in particular, by the sheriffs, the local judges whose powers extended far beyond administering justice. The local boards were increasingly coordinated as the century progressed by national boards based in Edinburgh. So the government of nineteenth-century Scotland consisted essentially of this network of councils and boards. This autonomous system of local powers built on the already existing Scottish civil society, and so ensured that Scotland would remain distinctive. The Scottish constitution in the nineteenth century, then, consisted of the conventions and traditions governing that network. All this could happen because British politicians had little interest in interfering. The parliament in London paid attention to domestic Scottish affairs only at the behest of factions within Scottish civil society, and when they could sort things out among themselves—and that usually meant getting agreement among particular factions of Edinburgh

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lawyers—they could get their way by means of legislation. The UK state can best be thought of—at least for Scotland, England, and Wales—as a foreign-policy instrument loosely placed on top of essentially self-governing localities. It was one of the most decentralized states in Europe. The governing system retained legitimacy in Scotland for a mixture of pragmatic and principled reasons. The pragmatism ensured that the people in the losing faction in any particular dispute were always able to look forward to being in the winning faction in some other battle. So, although Scottish majorities were sometimes defeated by English majorities when these were in alliance with the Scottish minority, the system itself was not brought into disrepute because the Scottish majority changed from issue to issue. The main dividing line in Scottish politics was, on the whole, not between Scotland and England, but between the principles which were used to justify the alliance with England in the first place—free trade, liberty, and limited government. In particular, Scotland did not need to develop a separatist nationalism in the nineteenth century because no faction in the country’s politics ever felt sufficiently disenfranchised from the political system to want to change it. The nationalism which did develop was cultural and Unionist. These nationalists celebrated Scotland’s great achievement in having voluntarily entered and sustained a Union that brought great benefits to the nation. If Scotland had surrendered sovereignty, it had chosen to do so, and could always assert its identity as a nation to remind England not to take its friendship for granted.

III. This system of elite politics coupled with local self-government was placed under great strain in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. The essence of the conflict was a perception by the Whigs that the old system was dominated by the Tories. The Whigs were broadly the representatives of the emerging middle classes in the industrializing towns and cities, and they presented themselves as the true heirs of eighteenthcentury rationalism. Their leaders, such as Henry Cockburn and Francis Jeffrey, believed that they were in the vanguard of rationalist and liberal thought for the whole of the civilized world. There were two long-lasting political outcomes of this agitation. The first was the extension of the franchise in 1832–33, both for elections to the parliament in London, and for the governing councils of the burghs and counties. The second major political change around this time was the split of the Church of Scotland in 1843. This Disruption was in protest against the influence which landlords could exercise over the appointment of ministers, something which offended against the nominally democratic base of Presbyterian church government. Some 40 per

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cent of the members left to form a new Free Church, which then set about building up a parallel system of churches, schools, and poor relief. The protest was, again, led by the liberal middle class. The political system that emerged from the reforms and the accompanying turbulence was liberalism. Scottish liberalism shared key tenets with the liberal programs of progressive politicians throughout Europe and North America. Central to it was a belief in free trade and free markets more generally. The role of government was, in that sphere, to remove impediments to the smooth operation of the industrial economy. These attitudes were inherited from the rationalism of the eighteenth century, as was the accompanying belief in free speech and the right of individual citizens to be free of political interference in their private lives. At the same time, Scottish liberalism developed a strongly paternalistic strand, influenced by the Protestant belief that those who had risen to the top of society had a duty to help those who were less well-off. Thus the Scottish middle class had a view of themselves as natural rulers, helping to free the rest of Scottish society from political oppression and material want. As the century progressed, they extended this vision beyond Britain to the Empire. Just as in the eighteenth century the Scots were happy to leave foreign affairs to a British realm, so now the Empire was seen as the arena in which the Union had had its greatest achievements. All the evidence is, moreover, that the mass of the Scottish population shared this enthusiasm for Empire: the Union was almost never seriously questioned at any time before the 1880s, and even then the questioning was about reform, not separation. Scottish trade, Scottish culture, and Scottish identity had become intimately tied to the Empire and therefore to England. The political identity that then flourished in Scotland has been described as unionist nationalism. On the one hand, Scotland had to be in the Union to realize its true potential as a nation: thus to be a true nationalist, it was necessary to be a unionist. On the other hand, to be a true unionist, it was necessary to be a nationalist, because, in the absence of Scottish nationalist assertion, the union would degenerate into an English takeover of Scotland. Scotland repeatedly had to remind England—and itself—that it was a partner in the Union, and that it retained the ultimate right to secede. Nineteenth-century Scottish politics left a legacy that helped shape the politics of the twentieth century: the rhetoric of liberalism, applied to a widening range of social groups as the franchise was widened; an enthusiasm for the British Empire, as offering unrivalled opportunities for trade and for cultural influence, meaning then largely religious mission; and a growing belief, founded in Protestant paternalism, that the state had a duty to intervene in society to regulate morality and to mitigate the bad effects of the free market.

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IV. Localism remained strong in twentieth-century Scottish politics, but this came increasingly into tension with the power of the central state. The key fact about this process, however, is that it was fought out largely within a Scottish realm, because Scotland developed its own version of the central state, the Scottish Office. The origin of that body is in the creation in 1885 of the post of Scottish Secretary, in response to nationalist campaigning for Scottish matters to be given more attention by Westminster. There would have been no need for this if Westminster politics had remained confined to Imperial matters. The Scottish concerns—which spread across the spectrum of politics—arose because the central government was taking a growing role in social policy. The Scottish Office has grown ever since. Its main period of expansion was between 1920 and 1940, when it took over the activities of the Scottish boards that had been inherited from the nineteenth century. In that period, the Scottish Office became the defender of Scotland’s national interest, equally under Labour or Conservative governments. In a period when the main social questions had to do with the decline of heavy industry and the building-up of the welfare state, the crucial political questions were about the distribution of state-sponsored resources. The Scottish Secretary, elevated to a Secretary of State with Cabinet rank in 1926, lobbied for greater public spending, special legislation, and generally for Scotland to be allowed to get on with developing her own welfare state free of interference (but also with access to the superior resources of the UK as a whole). The system of government that emerged to deal with the new state role in welfare was, by the 1940s, commanding the support of most Scottish politicians. It was broadly agreed that the state should be the direct provider of health, education, and financial support to people living in poverty. The state also took on a responsibility to plan the economy in such a way that unemployment would be reduced, if not ended. And it was even agreed that the state should have some role in owning some key industries and services: for example, railways, coal mining, and power generation. The consensus also existed in England, but it was more extensive in Scotland. All the parties also inherited the nineteenth-century view that Scotland was a partner in the Union: it could best realize itself as a nation if it remained within the Union, and could best ensure its status as a partner by always reminding England that Scotland was a nation, not a region. So the Unionist Party was nationalist and unionist at the same time, protesting against some of the 1945 Labour Government’s proposals to nationalize industry, on the grounds that it would remove control from

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Scotland to London. And the Labour Party asserted the needs of the areas of declining heavy industry in nationalist terms, couched in the language of the rights of the Scottish people to work. The politicians and civil servants in the Scottish Office used this opposition nationalism to put pressure on London for more resources. Nationalism of this moderate sort therefore became the taken-for-granted framework for all Scottish political debate. The legacy of this system of governing Scotland provides the immediate background to the politics of the period from the 1960s onwards. There are two key components: (i) that state intervention is justified to alleviate the harmful effects of the market, and to promote social welfare; and (ii) that the Scottish Office should act as the defender of Scotland’s national interests, providing the framework in which the state should intervene in Scotland.

V. Alongside this official nationalism was campaigning of a more militant sort, advocating a directly elected Scottish parliament. There was a long tradition of support for such a parliament, stretching back to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was present in the campaign that secured a Scottish Secretary, although only as a minority view. It also grew in the Liberal Party towards the end of the century, partly in response to Gladstone’s offers of Home Rule for Ireland. There was a belief in some Liberal circles that Scotland was a more radical country than England, and that Scottish preferences for welfare legislation were being held back by English conservatism. There was also a view that the Westminster parliament was congested, and that by devolving legislation on domestic matters to parliaments for Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England, Westminster could be left free to concentrate on the Empire. Supporters of appointing a Scottish Secretary believed that such a post would also contribute to alleviating the pressure on Westminster, by helping to channel Scottish concerns more efficiently into draft legislation. In 1934 the Scottish National Party (SNP) was formed by amalgamating the National Party of Scotland with the much smaller Scottish Party, which was on the right of politics and wanted Home Rule, not independence. The tension between independence and Home Rule has been felt in the SNP ever since. The conditions were not right for a full-blown nationalism in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most people—and especially most politicians— were happy with the compromise that had been reached between the 1920s and the 1940s—a distinctively Scottish branch of the administrative state. They were content because this was delivering the goods:

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material welfare for the mass of the population on an unprecedented scale, dispensed according to Scottish traditions. The credibility of the system started to decay, however, as the state became less able to deliver material welfare, and it was then that support for a Scottish parliament began its rise. To say this is not to claim that the sole explanation of that support is material. It is merely to point out that the Scottishness that people in Scotland seem to want for their politics is in the framework through which material welfare is administered. Of course, beliefs about the economy are themselves influenced by attitudes towards the state: one of the main constitutional problems for the UK state in Scotland since the 1960s has been a popular Scottish perception that it is economically incompetent. The change which happened in the 1960s was that the economic credibility of the UK state began to be questioned as never before. The long expansion of the post-1945 period was coming to an end, thus showing up how anachronistic were large parts of the British economy. The Scottish economy, still resting on the same staples as in the second half of the nineteenth century, was especially threadbare. The Labour Government of 1964–70 attempted to modernize these legacies on the basis of social democracy, but failed, and the Labour Government of 1974–79 barely managed to survive from one political crisis to the next, far less to embark on a new ideological project. In this respect, British social democracy was following a European trend, where the welfare state consensus of the previous 40 years was crumbling and in desperate need of intellectual renewal. What made Scotland peculiar in this context was not the perception that the post-1945 welfare state was failing to live up to expectations, but that it was the UK link itself that was blamed, rather than the political progenitor of the welfare state, social democracy. Social democracy remained the dominant political preference in Scotland. The first signs of the questioning of the tension with England were evident in the late 1950s, when the Unionist Party started its 40-year slide from over half the popular vote in the 1955 general election, to 1997, when it reached its lowest point in a general election with just 17.5 per cent of the vote, and the end of its parliamentary representation in Scotland. There were two main reasons for this decline. The first was that the Protestant working class slowly stopped voting on religious grounds, and shifted to the Labour Party (and later the SNP). The Catholic working class had always been with Labour. The second is that the Scottish middle class never abandoned a belief in the public provision of welfare, and so was unwilling to follow the Conservative Party in its 1970s move to the free-market right. The middle class therefore shifted to all three nonConservative parties.

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But that first sign of Scottish voting distinctiveness was not immediately evident: it became so only when the continuing strength of the Conservative Party in England in the 1980s showed up the national differences sharply. But the second sign of Scottish difference was immediately apparent: the rise in popular support for the SNP in the late 1960s and in their widespread electoral success in local elections shortly after. Although the party did not sustain this success into the 1970 general election, they started growing again under the Conservative Government of 1970–74. They turned this fairly modest expansion into what seemed to be an unstoppable surge by tying their campaign for independence to the discovery of oil off the Scottish coast under the North Sea, a resource that seemed to remove any doubts that a Scottish state would be economically viable. Their high point was in the general election of October 1974, when they attracted over 30 per cent of the vote, and won 11 of the 71 Scottish parliamentary seats (they came a close second in most of the others). The most immediate interpretation of this growth of the SNP was that it was a challenge to the UK state: not necessarily an endorsement of the SNP’s goal of full independence, but at least a preference for a parliament. And that was how the SNP and its opponents chose to see events. The Labour Government of 1974–79 managed to get legislation through Westminster against the opposition of the Conservatives—now, under Margaret Thatcher, against a Scottish assembly—and Labour skeptics. But the price for passing the bill was that the proposed powers of the assembly were restricted even further, and that a referendum should be held in Scotland in which at least 40 per cent of the total electorate would have to vote in favor before an assembly would be set up. The referendum took place in 1979, and the proportion in favor was only 33 per cent (although this was a majority—52 per cent—of votes cast). The subsequent Conservative Government repealed the legislation. In the election that brought that Government to power, the SNP lost all but two of its seats, and its vote fell to 17 per cent. Why did the apparent popular enthusiasm for the SNP in the mid1970s become this merely lukewarm support for mild Home Rule in 1979? The answer probably lies in what is, in retrospect, the more important feature of the SNP’s success than constitutional politics directly. The SNP was, and is, an essentially social democratic party, just like the Labour and Liberal parties. The votes for the SNP were as much votes for continuing the social democratic project in Scotland as they were a preference for a particular form of Scottish parliament. When it looked as if the Labour Government could continue to deliver that project, the SNP waned. So the rise and then weakening of the SNP can be interpreted as the same phenomenon as the steady decline of the Scottish Conservatives. It shows the Scottish electorate expressing a

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continuing preference for a welfare state, delivered through distinctive Scottish agencies. Only if that was not available from the Union would these agencies have to include a separate parliament. What happened in the 1980s was that the Thatcher Government put in question whether that welfare state would continue to be available at all. The main sources of the Government’s Scottish unpopularity in the 1980s were social and economic: a perception that it was attacking the principles of government which were shared across the political spectrum. This became especially evident in the late 1980s when the Thatcher reforms moved from the economy to social policy. After about 1986 Thatcherism was extended to those areas of policy that the Scottish Office administers—for example, health and education. At the same time, the Government’s restriction on the autonomy and budgets of local government prevented the opposition parties—especially Labour— from being able to do much to counteract the effects of these changes. In social policy, the Thatcher Government was never able to command a majority of Scottish support, and even among social groups which were staunchly right-wing in England, in Scotland the Conservatives were weak: for example, among the skilled working class and the middle class. This division over social policy along national lines propelled Scottish opinion towards interpreting the problem in constitutional terms, even though the underlying causes had to do with social welfare rather than national identity as such. In particular, the Labour Party shifted from its grudging support for a weak assembly in the 1970s to the belief that such a body could have protected Scotland from Thatcherism in the 1980s. After the 1987 general election, it joined the Liberal Party and other groups in the Scottish Constitutional Convention to prepare a consensual scheme for Home Rule. Accompanying this tension with England was the growing importance of the European Union. Again, as with SNP voting, this sometimes appears to be directly about constitutions. The EU is attractive both to supporters of limited self-government, such as the Labour or Liberal party, and to the SNP. For the SNP, the EU provides a new framework of external security and trading opportunities to replace the UK: they argue that accusations of separatism are irrelevant if the policy is independence within the EU. For Labour and the Liberals, the key point is that the EU favors subsidiarity: the principle that decisions should be taken at the lowest level possible. Underlying these Scottish preferences for Europe is a cultural shift that is unprecedented in the period since the Union. No longer is England admired as the source of progressive ideas: that role has been taken over by Europe. Thus to call yourself ‘European’ in late twentieth-century Scotland has something of the same modernizing connota-

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tion as calling yourself ‘British’ did in the period between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. But, equally as important as the constitutional relevance of the EU is the perception that it has been close to the welfare state consensus that Scotland seems to favor. On the position of women, on the rights of workers, and on public spending on social infrastructure, the EU Commission was in conflict with the UK Conservative Government, and therefore seemed an ally to many left-of-center politicians in Scotland. Indeed, it is a perception of a European agreement on these matters that has given the constitutional issue its European dimension in Scotland. All the non-Conservative parties believe that a self-governing Scotland could readily find allies in the EU, and thus could have an influence far greater than its size would indicate. In this context, the apparently sharp differences between independence and a more limited type of Scottish parliament become, in the long term, fairly unimportant. Eventually, the big legislative decisions will be centralized at the European level anyway: decisions on macro-economic policy, foreign affairs, and probably defense. That leaves parliaments—whether independent or devolved—with control of social policy, precisely the areas in which the Scottish Office has had administrative discretion throughout the twentieth century. Scottish politics since the 1960s has come to be dominated by campaigning for a Scottish parliament. There are four main legacies of this movement: (i) the belief that Scotland is more left-of-center than England; (ii) a preference in Scotland for maintaining the welfare state; (iii) a belief, therefore, that the Scottish national interest which the Scottish Office had been leading since the 1930s was now not being served by an unreformed Union with England; and (iv) a feeling that Scotland’s social welfare goals would be better furthered in the European Union than solely in the UK. The Scottish parliament set up in the late 1990s will be its main inheritance. But it will also be drawing on the previous three centuries, notably the belief in liberal democracy, the preference for public provision of welfare, and—perhaps most fundamental of all, despite some nationalist claims to the contrary—a belief that Scottish interests have been best served when the country ties its destiny to its more powerful neighbors. The main novelty is that these neighbors are now seen as lying beyond England.

VI. Let us return to our initial argument: that we cannot posit an essentialist difference between Scotland and England. In particular, we cannot read the political divergences of the late twentieth century back over

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three hundred years of relations between the two countries. The negotiated compromise which was the Treaty of Union of 1707 no longer applies, at least in its strong form. This is not to argue that the Union has ended; rather that it is over in its historic form. What lies ahead is a different relationship between the two parts of the kingdom, either a quasi-federal or even a confederal relationship, or ultimately the end of the formal Union altogether. The divergence is not the result of long-standing, even starkly opposite political and social values, but assessments of diverging interests in the two countries. It is even possible to show that there is in fact relatively little difference between the two national sets of values, but that it is how they are read into the political discourse which is crucial. In the 1997 Scottish Election Study—carried out in the months after May, but before the referendum in September—we asked respondents about their likely vote in the referendum. People supported the setting up of a Scottish parliament because they had clear expectations of what such a body would do in areas of policy such as health, welfare, education, employment, and so on. In other words, the referendum outcome was not a reflection of people’s social location (their social class, gender, age, religion, and so forth). Nor, surprisingly, was it a simple expression of national identity as such. In other words, people were not voting ‘yes/yes’ (that is, ‘yes’ to both the establishment of a Scottish parliament and the giving of so-called ‘tax-varying’ powers to that parliament) as an expression of their Scottishness. Those who thought of themselves as British, and even English—though the numbers are small— were also voting ‘yes/yes’. It seems that people were expressing their Scottishness by opting for policy reasons relating to economic and social welfare. In other words, ‘being Scottish’ meant being in favor of public spending on services, being in favor of greater redistribution of wealth, even nationalization. It is important to say that Scotland and England do not differ all that much in policy terms—except with regard to education—at least not enough simply to explain what are very sizeable differences in voting patterns. There is not much evidence that these differences between Scotland and England as regards policy are the result of social structural factors, but it is plain that nationality does make a significant difference in these respects. Compared with others in Britain, Scots are more ‘socialist’ (on a socialist–laissez-faire scale); more ‘liberal’ (on a liberal–authoritarian scale); and less ‘British’ (on a ‘proud to be British’ scale). In other words, people in Scotland are still more left-wing/socialist than those in the rest of Britain, all other things being equal. Nor is this an artifact of the unit of comparison. Scotland is more ‘socialist’ and less ‘British

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nationalist’ than any other region/nation of Great Britain. In other words, feeling Scottish is significantly linked to left-wing values. This brings the argument back to the issue of political discourse, notably the domination of Scottish politics in the last decade or so by Labour and the SNP. This has helped to shape political values and opinion, while also being a reflection of these values. We know, for example, from both 1992 and 1997 election data, that there is little by way of political values and attitudes that distinguishes the typical Labour and SNP voter. That is why both parties are locked into a vicious political battle: they are both competing for the same broad and sizeable swathe of Scottish public opinion, and this in turn helps to shape the political discourse of Scotland in the late 1990s. Now that both parties are neck and neck in the opinion polls in the race to be the largest party in a Scottish parliament—though not, of course, for Westminster, where Labour have around a 15–20 percentage point lead—the more this nationalistleftist discourse is reinforced. Further proof of this interpretation is that the Conservative party in Scotland does so badly, even among its ‘natural’ voters. One striking statistic from the 1997 election study is that just as many—or few—of Scotland’s middle classes voted Tory in 1997 as of England’s semi- and unskilled working classes. As regards the mainstream of Scottish public opinion, the Conservative party are so out of line on these policy issues that they are deemed to be an ‘English’ party. In other words, national identity and policy preferences interact with each other to produce a ‘left-wing Scottish’ agenda which doubly disadvantages the Tories in Scotland. None of this, of course, is set in stone, but it does mean that shedding their ‘English’ image will require the Conservatives to reposition themselves back into the mainstream policy agenda in Scotland. Whether the Tories like it or not, the Scottish electorate believes that being Scottish is being left-of-center and liberal. Being left-of-centre and liberal in England (or Wales), of course, does not mean being Scottish, but north of the border that link between nationality and the policy agenda is very clear. In other words, if you define yourself as Scottish, you tend to have certain values and policy attitudes; and if you have certain values and policy attitudes, then you are more likely to define yourself as Scottish. There is nothing fixed and eternal about this. Political agendas have long shaped and in turn been shaped by national—and other social— identities. We saw how the long hegemony of the Conservatives in Scotland in the first half of this century was the result of their successful appeal to a Unionist–Imperial–Protestant version of Scotland, which in turn they helped to shape, and in turn benefit from electorally. This vision of Scotland was both the cause and the effect of Tory hegemony until the 1950s. Similarly, over the last two decades or so, a socialist–

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nationalist–secular vision of Scotland has predominated, which both Labour and the SNP (and to an extent even the Liberal Democrats) have both been the producers and the beneficiaries. Will a Scottish parliament matter? Our analysis indicates very clearly that what people want from a parliament relates to policy preferences. It is not simply a vehicle for expressing Scottishness per se. Nevertheless, the parliament is likely to reinforce national identity precisely because it pursues a policy agenda in which it is likely to find the division of powers unduly restrictive. If the parliament fails to make an impact on matters such as running the economy or managing social security, which are reserved for Westminster, then it is in a position to claim that it requires further powers at the behest of the Scottish electorate. In other words, standing up for Scotland’s interests may well require seeking more powers for a Scottish parliament, and if this evolves incrementally towards independence, then our evidence is that a clear majority of people in Scotland will not object. Matters of policy, identity, and constitutional politics are entering new and uncharted waters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Alice, David McCrone, and Lindsay Paterson. 1998. Politics and Society in Scotland. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Brown, Alice, David McCrone, Lindsay Paterson, and Paula Surridge. 1999. The Scottish Electorate: The 1997 General Election and Beyond. London: Macmillan. Campbell, Robert. 1985. Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society. Edinburgh: John Donald. Checkland, Sidney, and Olive Checkland. 1984. Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914. London: Edward Arnold. Finlay, Richard. 1994. Independent and Free: Scottish Politics and the Origin of the Scottish National Party, 1918–1945. Edinburgh: John Donald. ———. 1997. A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union Since 1880. Edinburgh: John Donald. Fry, Michael. 1987. Patronage and Principle: A Political History of Modern Scotland. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Heath, Anthony, Roger Jowell, and John Curtice, eds. 1991. Understanding Political Change: The British Voter, 1964–1987. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Hutchison, Ian. 1986. A Political History of Scotland 1832–1924: Parties, Elections and Issues. Edinburgh: John Donald Ltd. Kidd, Colin. 1993. Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1689–c.1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenman, Bruce. 1981. Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialisation: Scotland 1746–1832. London: Edward Arnold. Marr, Andrew. 1992. The Battle for Scotland. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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McCrone, David. 1992. Understanding Scotland. London: Routledge. Miller, William. 1981. The End of British Politics? Scots and English Political Behavior in the Seventies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morris, Robert J. 1990. ‘Scotland: 1830–1914: The Making of a Nation within a Nation’, in People and Society in Scotland, Vol. II, 1830–1914, ed. Fraser and Morris. Edinburgh: John Donald. Nairn, Tom. 1977. The Break-Up of Britain. London: Verso. Paterson, Lindsay. 1994. The Autonomy of Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Scottish Office. 1997. Scotland’s Parliament. Cm.3658. Smout, Timothy Christopher. 1970. A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830. Glasgow: Collins. ———. 1986. A Century of the Scottish People, 1830–1950, London: Collins. Surridge, Paula, Lindsay Paterson, Alice Brown, and David McCrone. 1998. ‘The Scottish Electorate and the Scottish Parliament’, in Understanding Constitutional Change, special issue of Scottish Affairs.

Radical Liberalism and Nationalism in Mid-Victorian Scotland RICHARD J. FINLAY

I. On first sight, the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism seems a contradiction. The former stressed universal values, such as meritocracy and good citizenship, within an ideology of economic laissez-faire, which did not recognize national boundaries. Furthermore, the promoters of European liberalism often had in their sights the relics of the Ancien Regime which were characterized as despotic, corrupt and a barrier to progress. Yet, more often than not, the opponents of liberalism were embedded in national institutions, such as the military, the church, the royal court and government service, all of which claimed the mantle of representing national identity and the essence of the nation. If nationalism was associated with tradition, and liberalism with progress and change, then one fundamental problem with national liberalism was how to represent itself as a movement which worked for the national interest, but at the same time did not undermine the essence of national identity by its overt challenge to many of the institutions which had long been associated with nationalism and national identity. One solution to this problem was to ‘reinvent’ national identity in such a way as to encompass the new values of progress and modernity, although universal and not the prerogative of any particular nation, and present them as being part of a historic, popular national tradition. In short, to claim that they had always been a part of the people’s history. One of the main reasons why the Liberal Party enjoyed so much success in nineteenth-century Scotland was its ability to portray itself as a defender of Scottish interests and as a vehicle for the expression of Scottish values.1 Scottish Conservatism, on the other hand, found it difficult to break free from its association with the aristocracy and the ‘old corruption’ of the pre-reform era, and whenever recovery seemed likely the party had a tendency to shoot itself in the foot by being insensitive to Scottish issues, such as patronage in the Church in 1843 and again 1

See Hutchison, 1986; Fry, 1987; Dyer, 1996; and Finlay, 1997. For the British context, see Biagini, 1992.

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in 1874.2 From 1832 to 1914 the Liberal Party enjoyed an unrivaled political hegemony in Scotland, with only one major setback in the general election of 1900, when party divisions and the impact of the Boer War conspired to give the Conservatives and Unionists an electoral advantage. Liberalism seemed tailor-made for the Scottish psyche as one Liberal put it: “I am a Liberal because I am a Scotchman … I find there is in every age a passion for the ideal, and a sense of the obligation of men who deal with public affairs to build upon nothing else than the principle of right” (quoted in Fry, 1987, p. 74). Even Liberals from south of the border acknowledged the Scots’ deep affinity with Liberalism. According to John Bright, speaking in Manchester in 1843: “Scotland, in former days, was the cradle of liberty, civil and religious. Scotland now is the home of liberty, and there are more men in Scotland, in proportion to its population, who are in favour of the rights of man than there are in any other equal proportion of population of the country … if they were separate from England, they might have a government wholly popular and intelligent, to a degree which I believe does not exist in any other country on the face of the earth.”3 Arguably, the confluence of Scottishness and Liberalism reached its apogee with Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign in 1879 when the Grand Old Man rallied Scottish voters against the evils of Beaconsfieldism in a ‘Festival of Freedom’ in which “not [for] the first time in our history … the first great effort for liberty—the first illuminating ray that has spread over the land—has come from Scotland … [and] none were better qualified to take that forward place than the people of Scotland” (Gladstone, 1879, p. 213). Clearly, Scottishness, however vaguely defined, was an important ingredient in the Liberal Party’s success north of the border.4 This leaves the historian with two important questions. First, it is necessary to explain how and why this ‘Scottishness’ worked to Liberal advantage and, equally, why the Conservatives were unable to mobilize Scottish national sentiment. (It is worth noting that many European national movements did have a strong conservative, backward looking, and anti-modernist wing.5) Secondly, if Scottish sentiment was so important, why did it not crystallize into a political nationalism of the type

2

For details of the quagmire of Scottish ecclesiastical policies, see Hutchison, 1986, pp. 156–62, 183–85. 3 The Scotsman (7 October 1843). 4 For a discussion of the importance of community identity in the British context, see Biagini, 1996; and Harvie, 1990. 5 See, for example, Breuilly, 1982; Mitchison, 1980; Davies, 1982; and Dénes, 1983.

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found in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Ireland?6 Certainly, Scottish Liberals were sympathetic to liberal European nationalism: Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth were respected figures, and there was widespread support for Italian unification, while Ireland—although not always—enjoyed sympathy from across the water.7 Finally, Westminster’s neglect of Scottish affairs was a stock Liberal complaint. For many historians and political commentators, the key question of nineteenth-century Scottish history is why in the age of European bourgeois nationalism did Scotland, with arguably one of the most entrenched, successful, and vibrant bourgeoisies, fail to have a nationalist revolution of its own? There is a problem with this approach: the question is loaded and value-laden, assuming as it does that Scotland should have had a nationalist revolution. As a consequence, much ink has been spilled in explaining what did not happen, rather than what did. If we reframe the question, however, to ask why the bourgeois revolution in Scotland was accommodated by the British state, it is possible to show how Scottish Liberals were able to utilize national sentiment in the same way as other European liberals, but without challenging the political integrity of the United Kingdom. It is the objective of this essay to address this issue. First, the issue of Scottish identity in the first half of the nineteenth century will be examined to show how it was subject to new pressures as a result of urbanization and industrialization. It will then discuss how liberalism was more able to adapt Scottish national identity to laissez-faire ideology and the growth of commercial society than was conservatism. Secondly, we will consider Scottish liberal notions of citizenship, the state, and the essence of what was thought to be good government, and how this related to the issue of nationalism. This can be achieved by examining Scottish attitudes to Irish nationalism, because radical Liberals often used Irish comparisons in a negative way to demonstrate what they thought were the best ideals of civic responsibility.

II. The impact of widespread industrialization and urbanization initiated similar intellectual responses throughout Europe. In spite of the growth of prosperity, an increase in democracy, and the rise of the propertied middle class, reactions to the rise of Mammon tended to be pessimistic, and Scotland was no exception. The Rev. James Begg complained in

6

There has been some discussion of this issue in Nairn, 1981, pp. 138–64; Finlay, 1997, p. 20; Kidd, 1995; and Morton, 1998. 7 See, for example, Fyfe, 1978, 1980.

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1853 of Scotland being swamped by an “increasing combination of evils,” which witnessed widespread Godlessness in the cities, a rise in prostitution and crime, social misery, and the decline of Scotland’s traditional institutions of the Church, the law, and education.8 This assessment had been made earlier by Sir Walter Scott, who talked about the disappearance of those things which “made Scotland Scotland”.9 A whole range of critics and intellectuals bemoaned the fact that Scotland as they knew and understood it was being eroded by the impact of industrialization and urbanization. According to Henry Cockburn, the nation had passed through its “last purely Scotch age … unconscious of the economical scythe which has since mown it down.” 10 Scottish society experienced traumatic upheavals in the early nineteenth century. There was the threat of Chartism and political revolution, cholera epidemics, widespread Irish immigration, and famine in the Highlands.11 For some religious leaders this was evidence of God’s punishment being visited upon a society which had become wicked and corrupt. “There could be no doubt that in the present mysterious visitations of Divine Providence the hand of God ought to be recognized—that as a nation we ought to humble ourselves before the Almighty, seeing that the national sins have provoked His displeasure and seek, by prayer and supplication, that He would revoke those judgments which may yet be pending over these sinful lands.” 12 Undoubtedly, the period had all the hallmarks of a national identity crisis. Perhaps the most serious consequence of the impact of urbanization and industrialization was the effect it had on the Scottish institutions of the Church, the law, and education. These institutions had had their independence guaranteed by the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England in 1707 and were universally regarded as the most distinctive national features of Scottish society. By 1850 each of them had suffered what seemed to many as irreparable damage as a result of the social and economic revolution. In 1834 George Lewis published his powerful polemic Scotland: A Half Educated Nation, in which he claimed that the much cherished system of parochial schooling had broken down (Withrington, 1983). The parochial system was designed for rural society and could not cope with urbanization; in the cities, it was claimed, uneducated children would grow up to a life of crime and vice. The Scottish universities, which had achieved world fame in the 8

Quoted in H. J. Hanham, Scottish Nationalism (London, 1969), p. 75. Quoted in Paul Scott, ‘The Last Purely Scotch Age’, in The History of Scottish Literature, ed. D. Gifford, vol. 3 (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 17. 10 See Henry Cockburn, Journal (various editions). 11 See Fraser, 1989; Devine, 1988, 1992; and Morris, 1976. 12 Witness (6 March 1847). 9

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age of Enlightenment, were exposed by a Royal Commission in 1826 as being rife with corruption and patronage (Anderson, 1989, pp. 27–70). The demands of business and commerce had meant that the distinctive features of the Scottish legal system were being eroded to bring Scotland more into line with English legal practice. In any case, most Scottish Whigs regarded the English legal system as superior to their own (Phillipson, 1990). Perhaps the greatest blow to Scottish identity in this period, however, was the effect on the Scottish church (Brown and Fry, 1995). The Revolution of 1690 had established Presbyterianism as the national religion of Scotland. Scottish Presbyterianism had a deeply embedded tradition of democracy or theocracy which could be traced back to the Covenanting Wars of the seventeenth century. Patronage, which was the right of a landowner to impose a minister on a church on his land— as a sort of property right—went against this tradition and had been abolished in 1690 and guaranteed in the Treaty of Union. It was reintroduced in 1712, and although disputes in the eighteenth century had more of a theological ring to them, by the nineteenth century the issue had become a weapon with which the Scottish bourgeoisie could attack the citadels of aristocratic privilege. In the year after the Great Reform Act, which enfranchised the Scottish middle class, the ‘ten years’ conflict began in the Church of Scotland. Middle-class evangelicals regarded patronage as a form of aristocratic privilege and denied the right of patrons to appoint ministers as, they claimed, this was the prerogative of the congregation. Although religious notions were important, the conflict over patronage can also be read as a challenge by the middle class to the social domination of the landowners (McLaren, 1974). In 1843 the church split in the ‘Disruption’ which resulted in the formation of the breakaway Free Church of Scotland. Patronage had also initiated earlier secessions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by 1851 there were three Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, each of equal size: the Established Church, the Free Church, and the volunteerist United Presbyterian Church, which came into existence in 1847 (Brown, 1987). Church conflict was a source of great division in Scottish society, and the wounds caused by the Disruption ran deep. From the perspective of national identity, the important thing about the division of Presbyterianism is that all three churches claimed to be the true upholders of the Scottish religious tradition. Presbyterianism, which had once bound Scots together in a national church, was now a source of division, although it can be argued that Presbyterianism per se increased its grip on Scottish society. It was undoubtedly in response to these widespread social and economic changes and the threat to Scottish institutions which prompted the formation of the National Association for the Vindication of Scot-

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tish Rights in 1853 (Morton, 1998; Hanham, 1967). The Association was a curious collection which encompassed radical Liberals and traditionalist Conservatives, and it campaigned on a variety of issues ranging from the trite, such as the correct use of Scottish heraldic symbols, to the altogether more serious proposition that the government should appoint a Scottish secretary to deal with Scottish legislation in Westminster. The Association was careful not to threaten the Union with England. “Self-government and self-administration are not, however, incompatible with the Union. Scotland will never be improved by being transformed into an inferior imitation of England, but by being made a better and truer Scotland.”13 Chief among the concerns of the National Association was the fear that Scottish identity was being eroded and that their interests were being neglected in Westminster.14 In many ways, the Association was backward-looking in its ambitions. “Let us now make one resolute to have Scotland for the Scottish people. Let an association be formed for her protection or all is lost. Let us in this year of 1852 make one gallant stand to revive our nationality, to restore our institutions and insure to future times our civil rights, our laws and the religion of our fathers”.15 Despite attracting a fair amount of public opinion and rallying several thousand supporters, the movement vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. One reason for its demise was the outbreak of the Crimean War, which diverted attention from what were seen to be minor domestic Scottish quibbles. Indeed, the London Times ridiculed the Association’s endeavors with the claim that the more Scotland tried to be a nation the more it became like a province.16 Of greater significance in its failure, however, were the ideological fault-lines within the movement. Apart from the difficulty of uniting Liberals and Tories behind a set of common objectives, there was the much greater problem, especially for radical Liberals, of addressing the causes of the perceived Scottish decline while remaining true to laissez-faire beliefs. In short, there was a paradox: the social and economic revolution which had propelled the middle class to prominence was also blamed for Scottish national decline. While defense of traditional Scottish institutions might be seen as one way of preventing national decline, it posed particular problems for the Scottish bourgeoisie, as these institutions had always been the 13

National Library of Scotland (NLS), The Scottish Rights Association, NE 20, 13–14, Book 1, 3. 14 NLS, The Scottish Rights Association, Declaration of NAVSR. 15 NLS, The Scottish Rights Association, Book 1, 78. 16 The Times (4 December 1856).

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repository of aristocratic patronage, which had been used to shore up their dominant position in Scottish society. Suspicion of the presence of the state was a radical Liberal hallmark. Echoes of this fear come through in their grievance that the government official in Scotland, the Lord Advocate, was a member of the Scottish legal profession, who, it was claimed, was inexperienced in politics and had little time to devote to his duties because of his need to conduct private legal business.17 It was argued that a proper Scottish Secretary would be an elected member of parliament and have clearly identifiable party interests, while a highly qualified member of the legal establishment, although not wearing a party badge and supposedly above party political interests, would always tend to reflect the conservative values of his class. The presence in the Association of the Tory sheriff of Glasgow, Archibald Allison, confirmed Liberal suspicions that Conservative support was motivated by self-interest rather than principle. Debates on the Scottish education system were hampered not only by sectarian religious interests but also by a fear that a national system would give too much patronage to the Established Church of Scotland (Hutchison, 1986, pp. 78–80). Furthermore, the continual growth in support for church disestablishment throughout this period is further evidence of hostility to state intervention (Hutchison, 1986, pp. 156–62). When the arguments of the Liberals who campaigned for the Association are examined, it becomes clear that there was a great deal of ambiguity in their support for the reform of Scottish government. While the creation of the post of Scottish Secretary and the necessary administrative apparatus was one antidote to the problems of Westminster’s neglect, radicals such as Duncan McLaren, the Provost of Edinburgh, were careful to stress that any reform should not increase the presence of government.18 Adhering to notions of minimal government and reflecting their hostility to state intervention, McLaren and others put the case that Scottish government could be reformed and cut down to make it more efficient. Indeed, it was claimed that the cost of a Scottish Secretary would be ten times less than current arrangements (Mackie, 1888, p. 127). The heavy presence of local authorities in the Association was also testimony to the desire to keep the machinery of central government to a minimum. The constant complaint against the evils of centralism and the encroachments of the British state was another Association hallmark. In many ways, this illustrates one weak17

Parliamentary Papers, Commission of Inquiry, The Public Boards of Edinburgh (1870). 18 NLS, Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland. The National Meeting in Favour of the Creation of a Separate Department of State for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1900).

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ness of the movement. The campaign to address Scottish grievances and neglect contained a large core body which was opposed to the extension of government, and this was bound to put it out of kilter with other nationalist movements in Europe which saw the existence of a state apparatus as a necessary prerequisite to national independence. In short, radicals who believed in minimal government were unlikely to make efficient advocates for Scottish nationalism: for them civic national identity meant the absence of a centralized state. Further problems emerged for Scottish Liberals, who were attracted by the ideals of nationalism. First, there was the question of Scottish identity and the belief that this should be expressed in terms of particular values rather than institutions of the state. Liberals were remarkably successful in reinventing notions of Scottishness which harmonized with laissez-faire ideology (Finlay, 1994; 1997b). The Liberal reading of the Scottish past had shown that Scots had constantly struggled to attain liberty both from English domination and from the pernicious influence of the Scottish aristocracy. Throughout the nineteenth century Scottish Liberals recast Scottish historical heroes in their own light in order to show that the nation was inherently meritocratic. Robert Burns, the poet, was a demonstration of the fact that talent was Godgiven and not inherited. William Wallace, who led the fight for freedom against English occupation in the thirteenth century, was described as a commoner who came to the nation’s rescue when the aristocracy had ‘let the side down’. The Covenanters, who fought against the imposition of the Anglican religion, were cast as men of principle who fought for Presbyterian democracy. Testimony to the power of these historical icons can be found in the numerous statues which were erected by the middle class throughout Scotland in the nineteenth century; more often than not they were emblazoned with the words ‘Liberty and Freedom’, words which need to be read within the context of nineteenth-century individualism. Further evidence of the power of the myth of an individualist and meritocratic Scotland can be seen in the pervasive acceptance of the idea of the ‘lad o’ parts’ (McCrone, 1992; Anderson, 1989). The ‘lad o’ parts’, largely a mythical creation of the middle-class mind, was usually a young man of humble origins who had used the supposedly democratic Scottish education system to climb up the social ladder. Thomas Carlyle, David Livingstone and a host of others were held up as shining examples of the superiority of the Scottish education system, and evidence that Scottish society rewarded those with talent, diligence, and ability, irrespective of their social origins. The Conservatives, on the other hand, retreated into an idealized, sentimental view of the Scottish past, best represented by the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, landscape paintings of the desolate Highlands, and a nostalgic mania for collect-

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ing historical artifacts and manuscripts of the nation from a time before it was spoiled by Mammon and industrialization (Finlay, 1997b; Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History). Radical Liberal attitudes to nationalism had to acknowledge the problem that Scotland, unlike other parts of Europe, was not kept down by an army of occupation nor by any other form of alien repression. The administration of Scotland was carried out by Scots, and Liberals were most often to be found criticizing the Scottish administration because of the actions of the Scottish aristocracy, who tended to dominate local government boards, and on the grounds of political economy.19 This was not such much a matter of the imposition of English authority as a fault within Scotland itself. Indeed, radicals were more inclined to seek assistance and form alliances with like-minded Liberals in England than with conservative Whigs within Scotland (Mackie, 1888, vol. I, pp. 250–87). Also, there was the indisputable fact that Scotland had made demonstrable progress since the time of the Union. “There is scarcely a house of eminence in commerce or manufactures in the Kingdom which does not to some extent owe its success of Scottish prudence, perseverance and enterprise, there is not an industrial department in which there is not a large infusion of the Scottish element in management. Within a comparatively short period in the history of a nation, its population has more than trebled. It has led the way in agricultural improvements. Its real property has increased in even greater proportion.”20 For many, Scotland had succeeded in the fields of commerce and economic prosperity because Scottish society was imbued with values such as thrift, hard work, and sobriety, and because Scotland, being historically poorer and more egalitarian than England, was thus more conducive to economic success. According to the Eighth Duke of Argyll, Scottish progress since the Union was not due “to anything she derived from England in the way of laws and institutions”, but was due to native talent (Eighth Duke of Argyll, 1887, p. 482). This idea that Scottish patriotism made a useful contribution to the Union would become Liberal orthodoxy in nineteenth-century Scotland. “What was the secret of the marvellous success of the Scottish people during the last century in Scotland itself, in England and in the outer Britains? …their poverty was equal to their patriotism: their energy to both. How did they succeed? By intense industry, by severe frugality, by constant adaptability to all circumstances and all conditions, however rigorous and novel they might be. And so it was that they raised Scotland to wealth and Scotsmen to power.” (Rosebery, 1921, vol. 2, p. 252)

19 20

This is a major theme that emerges in Mackie, 1888. Glasgow Sentinel (19 November 1853).

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Yet this success, it was believed, was only possible within the political framework of the Union. While many radical Liberals supported the National Association’s endeavors to secure ‘justice to Scotland,’ an equal number criticized it for being ungrateful and ignoring reality.21 It is here that we meet the crux of the ‘national’ problem in mid-Victorian Scotland. The Scottish bourgeoisie believed that freedom and liberty were essential to allow Scottish values and characteristics to flourish and achieve a prosperous society, and the Union with England was the best guarantor of those conditions. The Union, it can be argued, allowed the radical Liberals the best of both worlds: it provided the political context for prosperity and progress, while promoting a strong identification of supposed Scottish national characteristics with laissez-faire ideology. Scottish radicals supported liberal European nationalism because it was a means to attain progress and to achieve liberty from states and regimes which were perceived as bastions of autocratic feudalism. The decline of autocracy, it was argued, would make the world a safer place. The holding of a Peace Society conference in Edinburgh in 1853 was testimony to the strength of belief that laissez-faire could bring about world co-operation through the mutual benefits of trade.22 As we shall see, the ambivalent attitudes towards Irish nationalism were fueled by the belief that it was strongly identified with Roman Catholicism and landlordism. Although there were genuine grievances in Ireland, suspicions remained that the lack of civic values in Irish society meant that nationalism could not lead to freedom and liberty.

III. Radical Liberal ideas about Scottish national identity can be reconstructed by a close examination of their attitudes towards Ireland. Ireland was the other nation which had a Union with England, and Scots were forever comparing their own behavior with that of the Irish to show that they were the superior partners in the Union. While Scottish sympathy for Irish national aspirations and home rule were a feature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it must be remembered that even among Scottish proponents of home rule there was a strong residue of anti-Irish prejudice (Finlay, 1997a, pp. 44–48). One of the reasons why the Scots believed that they had benefited more from the Union and did not harbor anti-Unionist sentiments was drawn from their reading of Scottish and Irish history: “In the one [nation] all that constitutes true national life was left untouched; in the other it was deliberately attempted to be trampled out. Scotland 21 22

Glasgow Sentinel (19 November 1853). The Scotsman (30 September 1853).

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retained her ancient laws, her national church, her established and time honored civic and social institutions. Ireland was treated as a conquered country.”23 The lack of native institutions and the attachment to Roman Catholicism were blamed by many in Scotland for the Irish failure to develop a modern commercial and progressive society.24 The Maynooth Grant controversy was strong enough in Scotland to cause the loss of the Whig Thomas Macaulay’s Edinburgh seat to a radical riding on a tide of popular anti-Catholicism in 1847 (Hutchison, 1986, pp. 62–70). As we have seen, Scottish Liberals had an ingrained dislike of the Scottish aristocracy, and attacks on landowners became one of the most potent tools in their political armory. The Anti-Corn Law movement never really enjoyed as much support in Scotland as in England, largely due to the fact that Scottish farming was less reliant on cereal production and because there were fewer obvious targets (Hutchison, 1986, pp. 87–94). Scottish anti-landlord feeling, however, did express itself quite vehemently as a result of famine in Ireland, which witnessed an influx of destitute immigrants into Scotland in the late 1840s, and famine in the Highlands of Scotland. The triumph of bourgeois ideology can be seen clearly in Scottish attitudes towards the destitute in the Highlands. An extensive relief operation was carried out, largely through the actions of the Free Church of Scotland, raising the equivalent in today’s value of ten million pounds sterling. The conditions which were attached to relief were draconian and Highland peasants were required to labor for the bare minimum of food. Central to this approach was the belief that if the Highlanders were provided for they would lose their self-reliance. The destitute had to be weaned off charity and made to stand on their own two feet. Landowners were chastised for their incompetence and a rash of sales of Highland property and new management were instituted to bring estates into profit. Surplus population was cleared and emigrated. Landowners were condemned for their improvident management and peasants were condemned for their lack of industry (Devine, 1988, pp. 111–56). The attack on Highland landlordism was able to draw on and reinforce many of the stock-in-trade tenets of Scottish bourgeois philosophy (Devine, 1995, pp. 146–77; Finlay, 1997b). While making no concessions on the issue of political economy, religion was used to good 23 24

Glasgow Sentinel (19 November 1853). See Begg, The Handbook of Popery. Much attention to anti-Catholicism in Scotland has focused on the Orange Order, which was originally a Northern Irish institution, while less attention has been paid to indigenous institutions such as the Reformation and Protestant societies, which had an overwhelming middle-class membership.

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effect to beat the Highland aristocracy. The Established Church was accused of siding with landlordism and the Free Church did much to mobilize its evangelizing effort in the region. The fact that Highland landlords often refused to permit the Free Church to build on their land meant that many were forced to worship in the open air. Images of persecuted Highlanders taking to the fields for the sake of religious principles almost immediately brought them within the fold of the Covenanting tradition. The action of Highland proprietors provided useful ammunition in the campaign against the aristocracy, who were castigated as tyrants hiding behind the cover of privilege. Also, the fact that the Highlands were to become a bastion of fundamentalist Presbyterianism was evidence of the success of this policy, and marked a strong contrast with the Irish experience. The Highlands of Scotland, however, did not have the same issue of nationalism attached to them as the famine had in Ireland. Political economy had no time for national sentiment, and this was a lesson that the Scottish middle class believed that the Irish had not learned. Daniel O’Connell, as a Catholic landowner, was in many ways the antithesis of the Scottish middle-class, radical Liberal. Any nationalism emanating from this source was sure to be suspect: The state of Ireland is as deplorable as ever, and the measures of the government are said to be inadequate for the relief of the starving millions. It may be of some gratification to the Irish heart to know that the Great Liberator is suffering in no perceptible degree from the present dearth. He is domiciled in Darrynane and in the full enjoyment of rural sports … A Roman Catholic priest, who describes his flock as literally starving, has transmitted forty two pounds drawn from them to swell the repeal rent … the wish to relieve Ireland in her present difficulty is universal here, but is our charity rightly administered when it fills the pockets of O’Connell instead of the starving labourer? We ought certainly not to be prodigal with our supplies to a people who seem habitually disposed to give up their daily bread to feed the luxuries of their pampered and mendacious leader.25 While anti-Catholicism was obviously a salient factor in conditioning Scottish middle-class attitudes to the Irish famine, political economy and the absence of middle-class values in Irish society formed the main part of their assault. A peasantry made ignorant by Catholicism was easy meat for Irish landlord duplicity:

25

Glasgow Herald (9 October 1846).

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At this moment five hundred thousand destitute persons representing a population of at least two million are receiving relief from government in the shape of employment upon public works. The expense for the single month of January will be three quarters of a million pounds sterling. This ruinous scheme is to be replaced cautiously, but as speedily as possible by a plan for giving relief in food through local committees without exacting work in return. The peasantry will thus be free to work for farmers or on their own holdings, and the expense of supplying them with food will be defrayed by local rates, subscriptions and government donations. Of the probable expense of this new plan no estimate is given, we fear it will be enormous…. These hard earned pennies are to be swept in a mass into the pockets of the Irish landlords. Why this great injustice should be committed we really do not know.26 As we shall see, the differing experiences of the Irish and the Highland famines formed the first of many complaints that would emanate from middle-class radicals over the fact that Ireland was seen to benefit from preferential treatment. The Scottish Highlands were treated to strict political economy and a thorough dose of ‘Victorian values,’ and they believed that the same stringent measures should have been applied to Ireland. Scottish Liberals persistently complained through the period 1860 to 1886 about the amount of taxation that the nation contributed and the return that was received from the British Exchequer. Duncan McLaren, for example, complained that Scotland contributed over sixteen per cent of the revenue to the British Exchequer but got next to nothing back. In his The Financial Relations of Scotland and England, William Alexander voiced similar complaints (Hunter, 1892). The dominance of political economy can be seen in the arguments that Liberals used in favor of the extension of the franchise to match the size of the Scottish proportion of taxation relative to the rest of the United Kingdom: “Why should Scotland have only one-twelfth of the members when she pays one-eighth of the taxes?”, asked a vexed Duncan McLaren of the House of Commons (Mackie, 1888, vol. 2, p. 119). It was claimed that the Scots were fiscally underrepresented and the Irish overrepresented, even after the Reform Act of 1868. The little that was spent from public funds in Scotland was a sore point and was rectified only by the use of private subscriptions for art galleries, museums, and libraries (see Finlay, 1997a, pp. 41–51). In 1875 the Poor Law Removal (Ireland) Bill came under attack from Scottish radical Liberals, who

26

Glasgow Herald (29 January 1847).

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claimed that it gave Irish paupers an unfair advantage in that one year’s residence was all that was required for relief, in contrast to Scotland where five years’ residence was necessary (Mackie, 1888, vol. 2, p. 97). By the time of the home rule agitation it was being claimed that the Scots contributed in excess of a million and got nothing, while the Irish contributed little but were given over eight million in subsidies. If financial considerations weighed heavy in the radical antipathy towards Ireland, then the amount of parliamentary legislation devoted to Irish affairs was a common source of grievance. This especially rankled the Scots. Land Reform and Church Reform were felt to be equally pressing in Scotland and the fact that the Irish were able to draw attention to their plight by parliamentary obstructionism or by terrorist activity meant that many Scots felt that Ireland was being rewarded for unruliness. The Scots, who as model citizens of the Empire did little to further their grievances, felt that they were being punished for good behavior. According to the rising star of Scottish Liberal politics, Lord Rosebery, “Justice for Ireland means everything is done for her, even to the payments of her natives’ debts. Justice for Scotland means insulting neglect. I leave for Scotland next week with the view of blowing up a prison or shooting a police man.” (James, 1963, p. 130). This nicely captures the sense of frustration that many Scots felt at what they regarded as Irish preferential treatment. The welter of special Irish legislation which flowed through Westminster was undoubtedly a factor which led many to campaign for the reinstatement of the Scottish secretaryship in order to add weight to Scottish claims at Westminster. Gladstone’s conversion to Irish home rule in 1886 must have left many Scottish Liberals disappointed. They had managed to steal a march on the Irish by attaining the appointment of a Scottish Secretary in 1885, only to be outdone by the Irish yet again later on. One consequence of Gladstone’s conversion to the cause of home rule for Ireland was that his previous statements regarding Scotland came back to haunt him. In 1879, at the Midlothian campaign, for example, he stated that “I will consent to give to Ireland no principle, nothing that is not upon equal terms offered to Scotland and the different portions of the United Kingdom” (Gladstone, 1879, p. 88). This and other statements to the effect that, if Ireland were to be granted home rule, then so should Scotland, were taken at face value by many of his supporters. This led to the creation of the Scottish Home Rule Association in 1886 and the formal adoption of Scottish home rule as Liberal policy in 1888.27 While Scottish home rulers might be expected to have found common cause with their Irish counterparts, this was not the case. Indeed,

27

University of Edinburgh, Minutes of the Scottish Liberal Association, 1888.

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they were highly critical of the Irish, and Parnell’s statement that Scotland had ceased to be a nation did not help matters. The Scots condemned the Irish tendency to violence, and there was implicit criticism that the Irish were being rewarded for terrorist activities: “The proposal to grant a Legislature and Executive government to Ireland and withhold them from Scotland, is unjust to a loyal and industrious and intelligent people and appears to set a premium upon disorder.”28 The Scots believed that if anyone had a prior claim to home rule, it was them, because they had acted as model citizens, their finances were in order, and the nation was in a state of social stability. The one exception to this picture of Scottish civic responsibility, however, was the outbreak of the Crofter’s War in the Highlands in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which many thought would lead to the same degree of unrest as was found in Ireland (Cameron, 1996). Lord Reay believed that the Highlanders, like the Irish, supported home rule because this would enable them to confiscate land for smallholdings. The fact that the Highland Land League was modeled on the Irish Land League and that the Highlanders were inspired by Irish tactics and objectives reinforced such notions. The rights of property were threatened; it would seem, by the dangers of irresponsible home rule democracy.29 Those who opposed Irish home rule used similar arguments. Critical at this juncture was Duncan McLaren, who occupied a similar position in Scotland to his brother-in-law, John Bright, in England (Goodlad, 1991). McLaren’s denunciation of Irish home rule was to have a dramatic effect. In many ways he was regarded as the father figure of Scottish liberal radicalism, and his intervention was very significant: “I consider it by far the most reckless and dangerous measure ever proposed within my experience.”30 McLaren believed that Irish nationalism was not to be trusted, and that it would lead to separation or civil war. Chief among his fears was the prospect of an Irish parliament controlling the police force. He likewise stated his opposition to a Scottish parliament, believing that home rule would exclude Scotland and Ireland from the running of the British Empire and that it would enhance the position of the Conservative Party in the Imperial Parliament. In many ways his views contained a paradox. Scotland had the necessary social stability and qualities of civic responsibility to make home rule possible, yet for that very reason home rule was not necessary. Ireland, on the other hand, did not have the civic maturity for home rule and it was 28

Protest of the Scottish Home Rule Association against the Denial or Delay of Scottish Home Rule (Edinburgh, 1890). 29 NLS, Lord Reay collection. I am indebted to David Forsyth for drawing this to my attention. 30 The Scotsman (17 April 1886).

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this which drove the cause. Home rule, it was argued, would not in itself resolve Irish grievances. The issue of Irish home rule split the Liberal Party in Scotland, although these divisions were not so apparent at the time, as most Liberals believed that what they had in common was more than what separated them (Hutchison, 1986). In spite of this, it is possible to see that the division of Scottish Liberalism had an ideological dimension in which those who supported Irish home rule were broadly more to the left and more favorable to state intervention and collectivism than those who opposed it (McCaffrey, 1971). From 1886 until the first decade of the twentieth century, home rule had little impact on Scottish politics. Ireland was deemed to take precedence among the Scottish parliamentary Liberal party. The period was dominated by Conservative governments which would have no truck with the idea, and although several bills were put forward, they had little substance. As much as anything, Scottish home rule claims were an effort to keep pace with Ireland. Most of the key protagonists in the Scottish Home Rule Association were radical individualists who had cut their political teeth on the National Association for the Vindication for Scottish Rights in the 1850s. Old ideas of minimal government, civic responsibility, and individual endeavor dominated the movement, and this was reflected in their proposals for Scottish self-government, which had little in the way of concrete details.31 In many ways, they were swimming against the intellectual tide. Laissez-faire in social and economic policy was coming under sustained intellectual attack, and it would take a new generation of Liberals and their ‘new’ philosophy— which envisioned a greater role for the state—to energize plans for Scottish home rule. That would happen in the period after 1906 (Finlay, 1997a, pp. 41–70).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Robert Davies. 1989. Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Begg, James. Various editions. The Handbook of Popery. Edinburgh. Biagini, Eugenio F. 1992. Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. 1996. Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865–1931. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31

See for example the proposals of John Romans and Charles Waddie in the journals The Thistle, The Scottish Review and the Scottish Patriot.

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Breuilly, John. 1982. Nationalism and the State. New York: St Martin’s Press. Brown, Callum. 1987. A Social History of Religion in Scotland. London: Methuen. Brown, Stewart J. and Michael Fry, eds. 1995. Scotland in the Age of Disruption. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cameron, Ewen. 1996. Land for the People: The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, 1880–1925. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Davies, Norman. 1982. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dénes, Iván Zoltán. 1983. ‘The Political Role of Hungary’s Nineteenth-Century Conservatives and How They Saw Themselves’, The Historical Journal 26, 4: 845–65. Devine, Thomas Martin. 1988. The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: John Donald. ———. 1995. Clanship to Crofters’ War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———, ed. 1992. Irish Immigration and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edinburgh: John Donald. Duke of Argyll. 1887. Scotland As It Was and As It Is. Edinburgh. Dyer, Michael. 1996. Men of Property and Intelligence. Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press. Fry, Michael. 1987. Patronage and Principle: A Political History of Modern Scotland. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Finlay, Richard J. 1994. ‘Controlling the Past: Scottish Historiography and Scottish identity in the 19th and 20th Centuries,’ Scottish Affairs 9: 127–43. ———. 1997a. A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union Since 1880. Edinburgh: John Donald. ———. 1997b. ‘Myths, Heroes and Anniversaries in Modern Scotland,’ Scottish Affairs 18: 108–26. Fraser, W. Hamish. 1989. ‘The Scottish Context of Chartism,’ in Covenant, Charter and Party: Traditions of Revolt and Protest in Modern Scottish History, ed. Terry Brotherstone. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Fyfe, Janet. 1978. ‘Scottish Volunteers with Garibaldi’, Scottish Historical Review: 168–81. ———, ed. 1980. The Autobiography of John McAdam. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society. Gladstone, William Ewart. 1879. Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879. Edinburgh. Goodlad, Graham D. 1991. ‘Gladstone and His Rivals: Popular Liberal Perceptions of the Party Leadership in the Political Crisis of 1885–1886,’ in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 , ed. Eugenio Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, 134–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanham, Harold J. 1967. ‘Mid-Century Scottish Nationalism: Romantic and Radical,’ in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson, 143–180. London. Harvie, Chris. 1990. ‘Gladstonianism, the Provinces and Popular Political Culture’, in Victorian Liberalism, ed. Richard Bellamy, 152–74. London: Routledge. Hunter, William. 1892. The Financial Relations of Scotland and England. Edinburgh.

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Hutchison, I. G. C. 1986. A Political History of Scotland: Parties, Elections and Issues, 1832–1924. Edinburgh: John Donald. James, Robert Rhodes. 1963. Rosebery: A Biography of Archibald Philip, 5th Earl of Rosebery. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Kidd, Colin. 1995. ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880,’ Scottish Historical Review LXXIV. McCaffrey, John F. 1971. ‘The Origins of Liberal Unionism in the West of Scotland,’ SHR 50: 47–71. McCrone, David. 1992. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge. MacLaren, A. Allan. 1974. Religion and Social Class: The Disruption Years in Aberdeen. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mackie, John Beveridge. 1888. Life and Work of Duncan McLaren, vol. 2. Edinburgh. Mitchison, Rosalind, ed. 1980. The Roots of Nationalism: Studies in Northern Europe. Edinburgh: John Donald. Morris, Robert John. 1976. Cholera 1832. London: Croom Helm. Morton, Graeme. 1998. ‘What If: The Significance of Scotland’s Missing Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Image and Identity: The Making and Re-Making of Scotland Through the Ages, ed. Dauvit Broun, Richard J. Finlay, and Michael Lynch. Edinburgh: John Donald. Nairn, Tom. 1981. The Break-Up of Britain: crisis and neonationalism. London: NLB and Verso. Phillipson, Nicholas. 1990. The Scottish Whigs and the Reform of the Court of Session, 1785–1830. Edinburgh: Stair Society. Rosebery, Lord. 1921. ‘Questions of Empire: An Address Delivered as Lord Rector to the Students of Glasgow University, November 16, 1900,’ in Lord Rosebery: Miscellanies, Literary and Historical, ed. John Buchan. London. Withrington, Donald. 1983. ‘Scotland a Half Educated Nation in 1834? Reliable Critique or Persuasive Polemic,’ in Scottish Culture and Scottish Education, ed. Walter M. Humes and Hamish M. Paterson. Edinburgh: John Donald.

Dutch Liberals and Nineteenth-Century National Traditions HENK

TE

VELDE

I. The Netherlands was one of the few countries where liberalism dominated intellectually and politically during a large part of the nineteenth century, and where the national past could be portrayed as the long, albeit partly discontinuous, pre-history of liberalism. Within the framework of the present volume the Dutch case is almost a counter-example. It is not about a struggle against an empire or redemption from one, but about regret for the loss of former imperial strength. Dutch liberals identified strongly with the memory of the Dutch seventeenth-century maritime empire and that of the Dutch Golden Age. This book was originally designed primarily to be a study of eastern European forms of liberalism. A few decades ago such a book would not have contained essays about liberalism in western parts of Europe. Implicitly, western Europe formed the yardstick to measure the progress or lack of it in other parts of the continent, but this seemed to be self-evident and without need of thorough research. Seen from western Europe, the history of liberalism in eastern Europe did indeed seem to be a kind of Sonderweg. However, it has become clear that the picture of German history as a Sonderweg presupposed the allegedly ‘normal’ path of British history, which was, of course, also a separate case with its own national characteristics (see, e.g. Blackbourn and Eley, 1984). The same holds true for the history of liberalism in different parts of Europe. Even if it is possible to distinguish successful from less successful forms of liberalism, this does not mean that there was a universal model. Each form of liberalism should be examined within its own national or regional context. In order to avoid taking western Europe as an implicit model, it is useful to include case studies from that part of the continent. These cases will demonstrate that even if circumstances in western Europe were favorable to the development of liberalism, each form of liberalism had its own peculiar characteristics and no form of liberalism was without its tensions. This book focuses on the tension in the relationship between liberalism and nationalism. In recent years, as a result of the changes in the interpretation of nineteenth-century liberalism, there has been an impor-

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tant reinterpretation of this relationship. In the past liberalism was often branded as merely an excuse for ruthless and modern individualism at the expense of the socially weak. Most attention was paid to the economic side of liberalism and the nineteenth century was presented as a very modern age. Historians still see nineteenth-century liberalism as a product of its time, but the interpretation of this time has changed. The nineteenth century is becoming a distant age—its resemblance to the twentieth is to some extent deceptive. Since, for instance, the welfare state was not a real possibility in the middle of the nineteenth century, working-class liberal sympathies were perfectly rational: a minimal state benefited the working classes because taxation was a heavy burden for those on whom it fell and most expenditure went to pay for things they did not support, such as the army (see Biagini, 1992). The reinterpretation of liberalism has probably been most spectacular in the British (or English) case. Looking into the historical background of liberalism, historians came to realize that its individualism should be qualified, and recent interest in civil society and greater interest in the cultural side of politics stimulated research into liberal conceptions of virtue and community. It became clear that liberal politics presupposed moral citizens with bourgeois values—‘men of character’—and a moral community (see Collini, 1993).1 Many nineteenth-century liberals were almost communitarians, albeit implicitly. The liberal idea of freedom was of a responsible freedom within the boundaries of a community. And for most nineteenth-century liberals the nation was the most important and the most obvious moral community. Since moderate Whig liberalism was the dominant political creed in mid-Victorian England (see Parry, 1993), English liberals had no need for the kind of oppositional nationalism that was characteristic, for example, of German liberalism. Somewhat complacently, their Whig interpretation of history took the view that the course of events in England could be read as the continuing march of liberal ideas (see Burrow, 1981; Blaas, 1978). In a sense, the English liberal experience was the antithesis of the minority and opposition experience of most liberals in Central and Eastern Europe. Small wonder liberals everywhere considered England not only as a sign of hope, but also as an example. England became the liberal model country, even for liberals with a strong position in their own land, such as the conservative liberal François Guizot in France. The Dutch liberals also regarded England as the ideal liberal country. Yet their situation already resembled the position of the English Whigs and liberals. As will later become clear, they also identified their

1

A summary of the reinterpretation of liberalism may be found in Bellamy, 1992, chapter 1.

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national history with their brand of liberalism. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, this identification became more and more problematic, the latent tensions in liberalism became increasingly apparent.

II. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was dominated by wealthy merchants and well-off burghers, and the system of government depended on relatively independent towns—Amsterdam being by far the largest and most powerful. Nineteenth-century bourgeois liberals regarded these burghers and merchants of the bygone Republic as their ancestors. They wanted to stress the continuity in the ‘national character’, so they neglected the difference between the early modern burgher and the nineteenth-century bourgeois. The Dutch liberals created a national past from their self-image. This was not too difficult, because until the 1880s the Netherlands was a relatively prosperous (second only to Great Britain in terms of income per capita), albeit barely industrialized country. The railway system was only finished in the 1870s; before then the country still resembled the landscapes made worldfamous by seventeenth-century artists. Self-confident liberals proclaimed that the bourgeoisie was, and always had been, the backbone and nucleus of Dutch society. The great national past represented both an example and a mission. In the nineteenth century, it was used to accuse the modern Dutch nation of decadence and slackness. After the 1870s, when the Netherlands, like many other Western countries, experienced a period of (relatively) vehement nationalism, a new element was added. The Dutch clearly demonstrated “the touchiness of a small nation with a great past” (Blaas, 1985). The Golden Age was still the shining example it had always been, but now the frustration of the loss of former strength was more painful than ever, although it was during the fin de siècle period, at the close of liberal dominance in the Netherlands, that this feeling became truly widespread. According to mid–nineteenth-century liberal historians, a proud and independent nation was born of the Dutch Revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century; in fact it was born on the field of the first battle, in 1568.2 This nation had a liberal character, so they thought. In their view, the Dutch Republic had been a freedom-loving country and the Calvinism of the age had been a kind of seventeenth-century liberalism. Had the Dutch remained true to their character, they would have retained the prominent place among the great nations they had acquired 2

According to the most prominent (and liberal) Dutch historian R. Fruin, who expressed this view on the occasion of the commemoration of the Battle of Heiligerlee in 1868.

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in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth century they lost their brave and pioneering spirit and became complacent and spoilt. To make matters worse, they had begun to quarrel, with the Orange party set against the Patriot party. In 1795, so the nineteenth-century story went, the fall of the Republic at the hands of the French was the only logical outcome of this situation. After regaining independence in 1813, only a few Dutch still dreamed of an international position comparable to that of the seventeenth century. Even the fact that the divided Republic had been replaced by a united Kingdom (The Netherlands plus Belgium, from 1815 to 1830) could not change things.Yet one could still be proud of the great national past, which was not something to put behind one, but something to cherish and to be inspired by. If the power of the Republic could not live again, its spirit could. Of course, this view applied only to the Golden Age. Looking back from the second to the first half of the nineteenth century, liberals thought that eighteenth-century complacency had lingered on. A ‘symmetrical’ view of the past developed: from the middle of the sixteenth until the end of the seventeenth century there had been about 150 years of prosperity, followed by 150 years of decay (see Kossmann 1987, p. 367). This was the dominant view of the national past. With some qualifications, it was shared by the leading liberal politician Johan Rudolf Thorbecke and by most liberal historians. It took definite shape in the period when the study of history was being professionalized (by liberals: at the University of Leiden the liberal Robert Fruin held the first chair in Dutch History from 1860 onwards) and it became the basis of the profession. In fact, it was even shared by the liberals’ Orthodox Protestant opponents: in the work of their leading politician and historian, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, the same picture of bloom and decay prevailed, although with one difference—what according to the liberals had been the result of a fight for freedom and a liberal spirit was in his eyes the work of Calvinism and the fight for the Protestant religion. The story of bloom and decay has been powerful and persistent. To this day, the Dutch Golden Age fires the imagination of The Netherlands and the world.3 On the other hand, taking the Dutch eighteenth century seriously has always been difficult. It has remained the age of laziness, laxity, and futile attempts at revival. Only recently has the importance of the period become entirely clear. Compared to the natural growth of great powers such as France and Britain, the decline of the eighteenth century appears to have been mainly a relative decline.4 More3 4

See the phenomenal success of Schama, 1987. See, for example, Kossmann, 1978, chapter 1.

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over, something new did appear. The development of modern nationalism from the 1780s and the establishment in 1798 of a unitary state instead of the divided provinces of the Republic—in the wake of the French invasion of 1795—implied a break with the Dutch Old Regime, and laid the foundation for the modern Dutch state.5 The outbursts of more or less violent political division and ‘schismatic’ party politics, and the eventual loss of independence to Napoleon, however, established the period as that which would act as an absolute deterrent for the century that followed. In a sense the Dutch nineteenth century knew both a national past and a non-national past. Already the ‘patriot’ party of the 1780s (which afterwards sympathized with the French Revolution) put the moral laxity of the age down to ‘Frenchification’, that is, to foreign cultural influence (Frijhoff, 1989; Te Velde, 1996, p. 88). As in many other European countries during the nineteenth century, an ambivalent attitude towards France persisted. The Dutch elite admired French culture and literature, and went to Paris on a regular basis, but French morals and French revolutionary politics—and, at the end of the century, the disorderly politics of the Third Republic—were rejected. Nowadays, historians regard the years between 1795 and 1813—first of the ‘Batavian’ Republic, then the short-lived kingdom of Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon, and finally the annexation by Napoleon’s France—as essential for Dutch nation-building, but many nineteenth-century Dutch preferred to forget the period and stressed continuity with the Golden Age. As the French historian Ernest Renan put it in his famous lecture ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, national culture is a matter of remembering and of forgetting (Anderson, 1983, pp. 199–203; van Sas, 1992, pp. 13–14).6 Apart from some isolated liberal and socialist radicals, the Dutch tended to forget the eighteenth century (or to stick to simple clichés when referring to it), while they made very much of the Golden Age. To be able to cling to the continuity with the cherished Golden Age, they neglected the discontinuity of 1795–1813—the break with the Republic and the invention of the unitary state—and told the story of bloom and decay; moral exhortation was required to revive the spirit of the Golden Age. Nevertheless, there was a somewhat troubled relationship with the past in the Netherlands of the nineteenth century. The odd political structures of the Republic could not set an example for the new constitutional monarchy—in fact, in some ways they even acted as a deterrent. 5

See, for example, Jacob and Mijnhardt, 1992. Some general remarks in van Sas (1993). 6 Anderson mainly deals with the forgetting of such national tragedies as civil wars; the Dutch wanted to forget ‘1795–1813’ because it was regarded as a low point in national history, a tragicomedy rather than a tragedy.

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Fortunately, they had vanished forever, as the leading liberal historian Robert Fruin put it, and the new prosperity could not be presented as the outcome of gradual progress, as the Whigs had presented it in Britain (Blaas, 1997, p. 21). The discontinuity was too obvious and, compared to the brilliant Republic, new prosperity could only be ‘relative’ prosperity.

III. ‘The old days will return’ was the slogan of the famous proclamation with which the son of the last Stadholder of the Republic, the future king William I, was received when he came ashore near The Hague in 1813 after the defeat of the French. Of course, the old days did not return. The Netherlands was a unitary state now, and a monarchy at that. Most of the administrative reforms introduced by the French were accepted. The most important change was the union of the old Republic with the former Austrian Netherlands—what would later become Belgium. The Dutch had been used to a kind of (oligarchical) self-government; the ‘Belgians’ were not. Whereas the Dutch knew the Orange family as their former stadholders, to the Belgians the Oranges were perfect strangers. Little wonder that they were more suspicious of the new government’s intentions. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands of 1815 was to be based on a written constitution. The Dutch in the constituent assembly were not very critical, but the Belgians wanted a guarantee for the protection of the Catholic religion (against the Dutch Calvinist majority) and an explicit article on the freedom of the press. On the last account in particular, the Dutch argued that their national traditions offered sufficient guarantees (Jansen, 1998). William pledged to honor the constitution, yet he liked to think that the constitution was his gift to the population, a favor instead of a right. The constitution of the new kingdom was relatively liberal, but William’s administrative practice was not. A parliament existed and the king could not become a dictator; yet he was a dynamic and paternalistic ruler who regarded oppositional subjects as “méchants enfants.” 7 Under these circumstances, it was difficult for the concept of a ‘loyal opposition’ to develop, especially because political opposition tended to recall the disastrous struggles at the end of the eighteenth century. The Belgian opposition buried the tentative liberalism of the north of the Kingdom.8 In 1830 the experimental United Kingdom broke asunder.

7

See Tamse and Witte, 1992, particularly the contributions of H. de Valk and I. Worst. 8 On Northern opposition, see van Sas, 1982.

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Although some Dutch had pleaded the same claims as the Belgians, hardly any sympathized with the Belgian ‘mutineers’. Northern nationalism buried liberal sentiment. Nevertheless, in the long run the situation created by the Belgian Revolt stimulated the development of liberalism in The Netherlands. William I did not want to agree to Belgian independence, and the army had to be maintained at full strength. Budget problems were the inevitable result, and the country became restive. Following the formal settlement of Belgian independence in 1839, a revision of the constitution was needed. Some ‘liberals’ had been advocating this revision for a number of years. The word ‘liberalismus’ (later: ‘liberalisme’) had appeared in the Dutch language in the 1820s (Stuurman, 1992, p. 110; Aerts, 1997, p. 127), and was mostly associated with unbridled indiscipline and with the French Revolution. Now revision of the constitution became its battle cry. D. Donker Curtius advocated ministerial responsibility, direct elections (instead of the existing indirect vote), and a more public approach to government (Stuurman, 1992, p. 115; 1997, especially pp. 36–40). The revision of the constitution in 1840, however, disappointed all parties. Although in fact the revision was very limited, the King did not accept the reduction of his Kingdom and abdicated (also because he wanted to marry a Catholic countess, a morganatic marriage the country did not like). In 1844 the law professor J.R. Thorbecke, who was the author of one of the very few systematic critical commentaries on the articles of the constitution, proposed a revision of the constitution in parliament. He did so in conjunction with other liberals, and became the liberal leader despite the proposal being rejected by a large majority. Thorbecke studied for some time in Germany, and his liberalism had a German or at least a continental flavor. It was juridical, professorial, centered on the constitution, and very respectable; it resembled the liberalism of the Frankfurt parliament of 1848 and the doctrinaire liberalism of François Guizot. Amsterdam was still a quiet city—no Paris or London—and the Netherlands was dominated by a small-town culture: not conservative in a strict sense but not really liberal either. Dutch liberals who wanted to be successful had to make clear they were no radical Jacobins. Thorbecke became the dominant figure of Dutch reformist liberalism by dint of his consequent constitutionalism; on the other hand, making use of his dry legalism, he was able to respond effectively to the accusations of Republicanism and Jacobinism that were leveled against him. However, it was as a legislator and minister that he could really demonstrate his political style and approach in action. Thorbecke had to wait for the revolutionary year of 1848 to arrive at this position. When revolution broke out in France and Germany, William II, the politically unstable king who had succeeded his father in 1840, thought that only

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liberal reforms would keep the country quiet. Thorbecke, along with some political friends, was called upon to draw up a revised constitution which the King pushed through parliament. In 1849 he became prime minister. Thorbecke was also a constitutional historian: he wrote a series of influential essays on Dutch history (Thorbecke, 1860). He stuck to the story of bloom and decay, but he stressed the importance of the period of French rule: the fatigued Dutch of the eighteenth century were unable to reform the worn-out Republic on their own—the French provided the impetus for the necessary renewal. According to Thorbecke, each period of history made its own demands. Chewing the cud of history and worshipping old traditions alone would not do: just as one could not satisfy one’s hunger with yesterday’s dinner, one could not rule a modern state by means of memories (Te Velde, 1992, p. 20). Modern civilization demanded freedom in all respects; modern politics, therefore, had to be liberal. In his famous unadorned and very sober style, Thorbecke wrote only concise essays. His version of national history was an abstract model of stages rather than a savoring of the rich details of the past. Thorbecke stimulated a kind of abstract legal objectivity in history and politics. His stern doctrinaire liberalism was a protest against the conciliatory and good-natured rhetoric of Dutch small-town culture and politics. Thorbecke was a somewhat rigid and distant man—his adversaries called him ‘the professor’—and an exceptional figure in the Netherlands, but the kind of ‘objective’ historiography Fruin and his like prided themselves on fitted in nicely with his approach. His legal style, moreover, was in line with the dominance of lawyers in Dutch politics and public life; in a sense, his standing in politics was also based on his consistent legal style (see Te Velde, 1997). In the bourgeois Netherlands, liberal politics did not have to fight against a well-organized court party or against a strong conservative nobility; its most important adversary was the traditional habit of smoothing matters over in little circles and in back-rooms. “You grant me this appointment, and I will get you that place: this shameful camaraderie usurps the towns, the Board of Account, the Mint, the Estates General.” 9 Doctrinaire liberals wanted to reorganize the state and politics; they advocated a critical spirit and openness in administration and politics, and wanted to formally determine all political competence (above all: the minister is responsible and the King can do no wrong). The franchise was restricted: liberals hoped for the awakening of politi-

9

Donker Curtius, 1839; cited by Stuurman, 1997, p. 37.

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cal consciousness, but did not mobilize the common people. Their politics were ‘constitutional’, not ‘democratic’ (see Te Velde, 1998a). In the 1840s the liberals were a small minority. In the 1860s they became the dominant political party. The doctrinaire liberals retained their critical spirit, but the object of their criticism contracted. They confined themselves to criticism as a (positivistic) method in science and the humanities. Liberal historical writing had become ‘scientific’, but had also lost some of its cutting edge. Critical, liberal evaluation of national history gave way to a kind of dispassionate quest for objectivity and historical detail, and an interpretation that stressed the importance (and lack) of centralization and unity in national history (Fruin). Furthermore, as members of the cultural and political establishment, liberals began to look to the national heritage in the 1880s. Around 1870, they organized commemorations of battles at the beginning of the Dutch Revolt (particularly 1568 and 1572) to stress its freedom-loving, liberal spirit, but now the main liberal review, De Gids, began to worry about the deterioration of old town gates and other treasures of the national patrimony (see Aerts, 1997, pp. 390–96). One need not doubt the reality of this conviction to point out that now (at least conservative) liberals no longer needed national history for the sake of bringing about political changes, but rather for cultural and social preservation. The next step was a shift from ‘Fatherland’ as an object of historical study to ‘Fatherland’ as sentiment. Conservative liberal historians like W. G. Brill now considered it their duty to neglect disruptive elements in the national past and to celebrate its heroes and glories (Brill, 1884, pp. 331–52; Aerts, 1997, p. 422). This was in keeping with what one could describe as an overall ‘emotionalization’ of public life at the end of the nineteenth century. In the arts, politics, imperialism, and nationalism, emotions were revalued. Initially this was a rebellion against the quiet, dignified, juridical, severe and moralistic attitude of the liberal bourgeoisie. Liberalism had given its flavor to Dutch culture, but liberals had also taken on the color of the older Dutch bourgeois civilization. Now artists broke with the bourgeois-liberal moral view of literature, supported l’art pour l’art, and reveled in the description of their own emotions. In politics, new movements of Orthodox Protestants, Catholics, and social democrats developed. They wanted to mobilize their supporters and used new methods to arouse them; while liberals cultivated rational discourse among gentlemen in Parliament and in debating societies, the new political movements created like-minded communities and introduced new emotions into politics by means of their new press organs and by bringing politics onto the streets. At first, liberals were perhaps mainly lookers-on in this process, but soon they were carried away, at least partly. This can be considered as a result of political weakening. No strong liberal governments ruled for

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a time after 1879; 1888 saw the first government formed by the religious parties. The 1880s were a time of political and cultural crisis for the liberals; then the 1890s saw three liberal governments. After 1901, however, no strong liberal government came to power, and the last liberal prime minister ruled from 1913 to 1918. In the 1880s, some liberals began to fear the disruptive effects of modernization, but others saw new opportunities. To counter the division that, in their opinion, threatened Dutch society, they looked for new unifying symbols and a new sense of community. Consequently, the new nationalism and imperialism of the period were partly their doing. Orthodox Protestants also supported the struggle of the South African Boers (many of whom were of Dutch descent) against the British Empire, but liberal notables dominated the mass sympathy movement and the board of the Dutch South African Society that was founded after the first Boer War (1880–81) and which prospered during the second (1899–1902). According to the Dutch— in a characteristic shift from history to contemporary emotions—the freedom fighters of the Revolt came to life again in the tough, old-fashioned, and orthodox Boers. Liberals also did their bit in the Dutch colonial movement, and supported the army in its struggle in the Dutch East Indies.10 Perhaps the most striking shift from a historical and juridical to an emotional approach occurred in liberal attitudes towards the monarchy. Earlier in the nineteenth century, liberals had protested against the paternalistic rule of William I. In 1872 the rationalist liberal Van Vloten still wanted to avoid the “unwise affection” (‘apenliefde’) for a King, and to restore the traditional name of Stadholder, the position held by the Orange family in the Republic (van Vloten, 1872, pp. 11–15). And in 1884, when liberals warmed to the monarchy, the prominent liberal Tellegen wrote a book on the ‘rebirth of the Netherlands’ at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. He wanted to warn his political friends against uncritical Orangism: one should not underestimate the historical merits of the independent bourgeoisie or the drawbacks of William I’s monarchy (Tellegen, 1913 [1884]). But he was wasting his breath. The new Orangism washed away whatever success his revaluation of the ‘non-national’ period round about 1800 could have had (even in 1998 a commemoration of the first Dutch constitution of 1798 still encountered difficulties, partly because of Orange sensibilities). Liberals have never been republicans. They did not want a modern republic, and they did not want to turn back to the Dutch Republic with its messy political system. They pleaded for a constitutional monarchy, 10

See, for example, Kuitenbrouwer, 1991; and the relevant chapter in Kossmann, 1978.

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and liberal historiography put forward the slow growth of constitutional government and the pitfalls on the road towards it. A shift can nevertheless be perceived, in the work of Fruin, for instance, from a sober, constitutional approach to a more sentimental one (Smit, 1958; Blaas, 1985). In the 1860s, the liberals won the battle over constitutional government, and now they worried about the disintegration of the nation by means of political polarization. In a way, Orangism became the liberal alternative to the new emotional denominational and socialist politics. The social establishment had become liberal, and enthusiasm for the Orange monarchy meant support for the existing order. Liberal notables did not turn Orangism into a liberal movement. Even if they had wanted to do so, this would hardly have been feasible, since Catholics and especially Orthodox Protestants cherished their own version of Orangism. Liberal notables presented Orangism as national and impartial, in much the same way as they presented their own socio-political position at this point—in practice, however, Orangism became anti-socialist. Of course, these notables did not harangue mass meetings, speaking out against other political currents; they remained composed, stately men. They did no more than organize Orange celebrations: from the late 1880s onwards they were the moving spirit behind the transformation of the birthday of the young queen Wilhelmina into the popular celebration that was to become the national holiday ‘Queen’s Day’ (since 1890 the Netherlands has had no king, only queens, so there has never been a ‘King’s Day’). When her father, William III, died in 1890, Wilhelmina was only 10 years old. She would be inaugurated as queen in 1898. This was the culmination of the new, ‘democratic’ Orangism. Orangism had always been popular, but now systematic organizational efforts were made to promote it. The booming economy of the final years of the nineteenth century contributed to the spring-fever that dominated the inauguration of the eighteen-year-old queen in 1898. Old notables felt ‘rejuvenated’ by the magnificent mass celebration (Te Velde, 1992, chapter 5). The celebration of 1898 was not distinctly liberal; nor did it demonstrate a strong historical orientation. Of course, the long Orange tradition was celebrated with the advent of Wilhelmina festivities, but the accent was decidedly contemporary and the Dutch looked to the future (of the young Wilhelmina and her reign). The year 1898 could have become a year of commemorations. In view of the mixed feelings about the Batavian Republic, it is easy to understand that the first constitution (1798) was hardly mentioned.11 But 1898 was also the 250th anniversary of the end of the war against Spain in 1648. Some newspaper arti11

But see the prominent conservative daily NRC of 4 May 1898, and Nijhoff, 1898.

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cles made a half-hearted attempt to commemorate the conclusion of the peace, but nothing much came of it.12 Even the commemoration of the liberal ‘jewel in the crown’, Thorbecke’s revision of the constitution (1848), was almost passed over in silence. In 1873 the liberals celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of Thorbecke’s constitution with a gentlemen’s banquet, and tried to present the day as a national holiday, but a formal happening like a revision of the constitution was no occasion for popular celebration, something much needed in those days of democratization. Besides, the liberal flavor of the constitution, which had been seen as an advantage in 1873, would have made a celebration too much of a party affair—even in the eyes of many of the liberals who were by now trying to pose as impartial.

IV. Once liberals became part of the establishment (around 1870), discord began to appear in their ranks. Patriotism, however, was not among the differences that separated left-wing from conservative liberals: virtually all liberals were convinced of its importance. The color of patriotism varied, however. Many left-wing liberals had their doubts about the sentimental national harmony some conservative liberals preached (the inauguration of Wilhelmina was probably the exception which proved the rule here). They wanted to retain a rational, critical spirit in society and politics. Some wanted to cooperate with the Social Democrats and, at the end of the century, they advocated a modest welfare state. Their political views carried over into their historical work. Left-wing liberals broke new ground in economic history (G. W. Kernkamp) and in the history of socialist thought (H. P. G. Quack) (Dorsman, 1990; Blaas, 1997). They scarcely offered an alternative view of national history, however, or looked for new heroes in the national past. Many of them were more interested in sociology than in history, and, in any case, this leftwing liberal shift to sociology was in keeping with an international trend (Collini, 1979; Logue, 1983). History, not to mention national history, was not their main concern. In the 1890s, Fruin’s pupil and successor, P. J. Blok, canonized the conservative liberal view of national history in his multi-volume Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk (History of the Dutch People: translated into English and German). In the nineteenth century, Orthodox Protestants and liberals had defined the canon of national history; history teaching at the universities was virtually a liberal monopoly, and the ‘scientification’ of history was very much a liberal

12

For example, the left-liberal historian G. W. Kernkamp, 1898.

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matter. In essence, the nineteenth-century view of national history remained dominant until after 1945. Before that time, social and economic history, and contributions by socialists or Catholics, did not change the situation. A parallel with the liberal position in society is noticeable here. Although in the early twentieth century the liberals lost their dominant position in politics, they still had a strong influence on society, not as a political movement, but as members of the establishment, in industry, the universities, the newspapers, and as public servants. Into the 1950s, the Netherlands remained a country of informal but strict and manifest social differences. In 1934, the poet Jan Greshoff wrote a famous poem about the essentially liberal, grave and dignified doctors, lawyers, and ministers, the “gentlemen in black” (donkere burgerheren) who dominated Dutch small towns. Much had changed since the nineteenth century, but the bourgeois, liberal-oriented notables, those “living monuments on the square”, were still visible (van der Horst, 1996, pp. 140–43). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the force of political liberalism was mostly spent, but the liberal-inspired interpretation of national history remained influential and the social position of the liberal establishment was, for the most part, unimpaired. After liberalism had attained its constitutional goals in the nineteenth century, most liberals did not find it difficult to adjust to the tone of Dutch society. In fact, this was a process of interaction. Liberals reformed Dutch politics, but they were also formed by Dutch traditions themselves. In a loose way, the Dutch Republic had been ‘liberal’: the Republic had known no strong state, court or aristocracy, but pragmatic and tolerant self-government by an oligarchic bourgeois elite. Before liberal politics came into being, ‘liberal’ had meant something like rational, broad-minded, and mild. The moderate left-wing liberal historian Colenbrander—the youngest and most promising pupil of Fruin—used the republican tradition as a weapon against sycophantic Orangism. In the Netherlands, he wrote, the Court is hardly awe-inspiring and there is little distance between the prince and the people. In our ‘republican’ country, the House of Orange does not rule over us; the ‘Oranges’ are our elected leaders and (in the Dutch Revolt) they started as rebels, just like us (Colenbrander, n. d., 52). Although Colenbrander wrote this in reaction to the passionate Orangism of his age, in general he was right. Even in Great Britain, with its long parliamentary tradition, the monarchy has been more ‘majestic’ than in the Netherlands, and in Republican France the traditions of the court of Versailles have lingered on.13 Republican traditions have col-

13

See Cannadine, 1984; and Kuhn, 1996; on the Versailles tradition, see relevant articles in Nora, 1984 –1993.

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ored the Dutch monarchy and Dutch public life, but these traditions have not necessarily been progressive or democratic. In the nineteenth century, the political oligarchy of the Republic ushered in the social dominance of the “men in black”. The Netherlands has hardly been a ‘class’ society: in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, Dutch society was one of informal, socially and culturally defined standen or estates (Te Velde, 1996–97). This situation had ambivalent effects on the nature of Dutch liberalism. As already stated, Dutch liberalism did not have to defeat a strong aristocratic or court party; no strong conservative party has ever existed in The Netherlands.Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century constitutional demands were not successful. Revolutionary and French politics at the end of the eighteenth century had exhausted the Dutch appetite for politics in general. Peace and quiet were the dominant values in Dutch society and in the vocabulary of the early nineteenth century. This was the first obstacle the liberal demands for critical debate and publicity had to overcome. The second was in line with the first. If liberalism was to be at all successful in the Netherlands, it had to make clear that its politics did not resemble those of the Revolution. Liberal politics, therefore, had to refrain from agitating the population at large and from mass mobilization; to be successful they had to be respectable. Since there were some similarities in the overall political conditions of Restoration Europe, there were some similarities in the varieties of liberalism as well. In style and thought, the successful Dutch constitutional liberalism of 1848 resembles the liberalism of the German professors of the Frankfurt Parliament and the ‘doctrinaire’ brand of liberalism of François Guizot and his friends.14 Yet, in the long run, it was more successful than both. Guizot was a successful politician, but after 1848 the doctrinaire tradition was forgotten in France; the same year saw the culmination, but also the fall of German Vormärz liberalism. In the Netherlands there were no traces of either the radical republican sentiments that broke off the French doctrinaire tradition in 1848, or the strong autocracy and aristocracy that hampered German liberalism. Once the liberals had won their initial victory in 1848, the bourgeois conditions of Dutch society worked to their advantage.15 The main provisions

14

See, for example, Siemann, 1976; and the relevant chapter in Langewiesche, 1988; del Corral, 1964; Rosanvallon, 1985; de Broglie, 1990. Te Velde, 1998b is an attempt to put the doctrinaire liberalism of the age in (Western) European perspective. 15 The lack of bourgeois traditions is an important theme in German historiography; see, for example, the work by J. Kocka and L. Gall, surveyed by Sperber, 1997; and J. Sheehan, 1988.

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of the constitution of 1848 and the liberal political system established in its wake have remained the basis of Dutch political life ever since. The most important addition to the liberal political system was the introduction of democracy (extension of the suffrage in 1887 and 1896; male universal suffrage in 1917 and female universal suffrage in 1919). This changed the nature of politics. Like most of their European counterparts, Dutch liberals did not like mass politics. They thought of politics as a gentlemen’s debating society, combined with firm administration. This was a conception of politics of a kind, but it was also a result of the Dutch standen society. The very respectable liberals did not want to address mass meetings, still less to arouse the people. This was even true of left-wing liberals who were more critical than conservative liberals, but almost as individualistic. While confessional and socialist parties were established, liberal organization remained rudimentary. In his well-known work, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, Schorske tells the story of “politics in a new key” (Schorske, 1981, pp. 116–80). He confines his story to confessional, anti-Semitic and Zionist politics, and virtually omits the Social Democrats. It seems to me that the Social Democrats also departed from liberal-style politics. Everywhere in Europe, new political movements used a new style: German Social Democrats, Austrian Catholics, and Dutch Orthodox Protestants all appealed to public sentiment in a new way. There is even a country where liberals used the same methods: Great Britain. Under the leadership of William Gladstone, there was a liberal mass movement in Britain.16 At first sight, the Netherlands of this period showed a lot of similarities to Britain: a constitutional monarchy, traditions of self-government, a strong Protestant tradition, including nineteenth-century revivals, and a strong liberalism.17 So why did a liberal mass movement not develop in The Netherlands? Apart from the fact that British liberals did not have to be as respectable as continental liberals because Britain lacked the frightening experience of French revolutionary politics, the answer to this question can, I argue, be found partly in the relationship between liberalism and Protestantism, partly in socio-economic development, and partly in the traditions of the ruling class. Nonconformist Protestantism gave a missionary, emotional impetus to British liberalism which Dutch liberals lacked (most of them were Protestants, but of a dry, non-orthodox kind). Besides, until the second half of the nineteenth century Dutch society

16

An enormous literature exists on the subject: for example, Vincent, 1976 and Biagini, 1992. 17 Siep Stuurman has written a number of comparative essays on the subject (1990a; 1990b).

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lacked the dynamics which industrialization had given to Britain, so Dutch liberalism and Dutch parliamentary politics in general were impregnated with older stately traditions of ‘liberal’ bourgeois rule and with the quiet atmosphere of Dutch nineteenth-century society. Ever since the nineteenth century the ‘tone’ of the Dutch parliament has been praised—or, conversely, its dullness criticized. No liberal prime minister has ruled since 1918 and from that date until the 1970s the liberal party remained a small one. And yet, nineteenth-century liberalism left an indelible mark on parliamentary and political traditions generally: “A liberal inheritance under Confessional administration,” as one historian has dubbed the Dutch interwar period.18 In 1936 the Catholic historian Gerard Brom wrote that “academic liberals” had “inconspicuously” schooled the nineteenth-century Catholic leader Schaepman in “parliamentary conventions” (Brom, 1936, p. 54). In 1940 the Socialist historian Jan Romein wrote that the humane values of the Dutch burgerlijke tradition had instilled liberalism into all great Dutch politicians. Socialist, Catholic, or Calvinist, in one way or another they had all been nineteenth-century liberals—Romein’s revaluation of liberal values can be explained, by the way, by the Nazi threat in the year of publication (Romein, 1946, p. 166; Te Velde, 1993, pp. 74–75). After the rather turbulent ending of liberal-style politics and the beginning of mass politics at the end of the nineteenth century, political and nationalist emotions died down; after the second Boer War most liberal notables refrained from vehement nationalist emotion, and gradually the new political movements returned to a kind of liberal respectability. The confessional and socialist leadership adopted many elements of the liberal bourgeois style—socialist leaders, for instance, began to wear top hats. Only when the socialist and confessional ‘pillars’ (closed sociopolitical movements) began to disappear in the 1960s did this bourgeois style disappear. The Netherlands is always dubbed ‘Calvinist’ (for example, Zahn, 1984), but there are also strong arguments to call it a liberal country (all the more so because liberals were also Protestants). Accordingly, in 1934 the famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga characterized the Dutch as “bourgeois” (burgerlijk) (Huizinga, 1968, 112); he really meant liberal in a loose, not political but cultural way. By that time liberalism was more of a cultural than a political force. In 1933 the birth of William of Orange in 1533 was celebrated. Due to political divisions in 1884, the commemoration of the murder of William (1584) had been a failure.

18

‘Een liberale erfenis onder confessioneel beheer’: J. J. Woltjer, 1992, chapter 2.

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The atmosphere of 1933, on the other hand, was one of national unity. Every political current had its own William—the socialists, for instance, praised the rebel prince—but, apart from a controversial yet ephemeral fascist attempt to take control of the celebration, everything went harmoniously. A pamphlet by the liberal law professor and politician J. A. van Hamel provides an illustration of the political use an interwar liberal might try to make of a national hero (van Hamel, 1933).19 The political stance of William of Orange and, for that matter, historical detail in general, did not interest van Hamel. To him William the Silent was a myth, an inspiring moral example and a unifying national symbol. Of course, van Hamel’s pamphlet was an incidental product, hardly serious scholarly work. Yet the political message was clear. To liberal law professors, the past had stopped being an incentive to constitutional reform a long time ago, let alone an incentive to other forms of political commotion. It had become an occasion to celebrate national unity and to dwell on historical and cultural values. After the Second World War Dutch liberalism remained a minor force in politics. Strangely enough, political liberalism only began to grow again after politics and national history had been decoupled to an even greater degree. The 1960s saw the end of the residual interest in national history (apart from the history of the War) as a legitimation for political ideologies. The canon of national history (Revolt, Golden Age, and so on) almost disappeared from the regular curriculum in primary and secondary education. At the same time, the closed socialist and confessional ‘pillars’ that had dominated Dutch socio-political life in the previous period disintegrated. The New Left made its appearance in the Netherlands, but so did a new popular liberalism. The New Left has disappeared again, but the new liberalism has remained. It belongs to the historical family of liberal parties, but many nineteenth-century liberals would have abhorred its individualism and unhistorical attitude.

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19

See the articles by P. B. M. Blaas, J. H. M. van de Westelaken, and G. A. C. van der Lem in Haitsma Mulier and Janssen, 1984.

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Stuurman, Siep. 1990a. ‘John Bright and Samuel van Houten: Radical Liberalism and the Working Classes in Britain and the Netherlands 1860–1880’, History of European Ideas 11: 593–604. n. p. ———. 1990b. ‘Nineteenth-Century Liberalism and the Politics of Reform in Britain and the Netherlands,’ Anuario del Departemento de Historia II, 153–70. Madrid. ———. 1992. Wacht op onze daden. Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat. Amsterdam: B. Bakker. ———. 1997. ‘The Discourse of Productive Virtue: Early Liberalism in Europe and the Netherlands,’ in Under the Sign of Liberalism. Varieties of Liberalism in Past and Present, ed. Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle. Britain and the Netherlands XII. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers. Tamse, C. A., and E. Witte, eds. 1992. Staats- en natievorming in Willem I’s koninkrijk (1815–1830). Brussel: Vubpress; Baarn: Bosch & Keuning. Tellegen, B. D. H. 1913 (1884). De wedergeboorte van Nederland. Groningen: Noordhof. Thorbecke, J. R. 1860. Historische Schetsen. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Velde, Henk Te. 1992. Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef. Liberalisme en nationalisme in Nederland, 1870–1918. Den Haag: SDU. ———. 1996. ‘The Debate on Dutch National Identity,’ Dutch Crossing. A Journal of Low Countries Studies 20. ———. 1996/97. ‘Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit in den Niederlanden des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts—Zugleich ein Beitrag zur politischen Kultur des Landes,’ Zentrum für Niederlande-Studien. Jahrbuch 7/8: 161–76. ———. 1997. ‘Liberalism and Bourgeois Culture in the Netherlands, from the 1840s to the 1880s,’ in ed. Groenveld and Wintle, in Under the Sign of Liberalism. Varieties of Liberalism in Past and Present, ed. Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle. Britain and the Netherlands XII. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers. ———. 1998a. ‘Constitutionele politiek. De parlementair-politieke praktijk en de grondwet van 1848,’ in De eeuw van de grondwet. Grondwet en politiek in Nederland, 1798–1917, ed. N. C. F. van Sas and H. te Velde. Deventer. ———. 1998b. ‘Onderwijzers in parlementaire politiek. Thorbecke, Guizot en het Europese doctrinaire liberalisme,’ Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 322–43. n. p. ———. 1993. ‘How High Did the Dutch fly? Remarks on Stereotypes of Burger Mentality,’ in Images of the Nation, ed. Annemieke Galema et al. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi. Vincent, John. 1976. The Formation of the British Liberal Party. Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press. Vloten, J. van. 1872. De mondige mensch als Nederlandsch staatsburger. Mijne feestrede ter Brielsche jubelviering. Schiedam: no publisher. Woltjer, Jan Juliaan. 1992. Recent verleden. De geschiedenis van Nederland in de twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam: Balans. Zahn, Ernest. 1984. Das unbekannte Holland. Regenten, Rebellen und Reformatoren. Berlin: Siedler.

Liberal Nationalism and Modern Regional Identity: Revolutionary Belgium, 1786–1830 JANET POLASKY

Twice, the Belgians revolted to win their national independence. Revolutionaries from the nine provinces first identified themselves as Belgians in 1789, laying claim to a heroic national heritage of civic freedom. The United States of Belgium, established by the Brabant Revolution, lasted only nine months. Forty years after the defeat of the short-lived Brabant Revolution, Belgian liberals and Catholics coalesced to secure a more enduring Belgian independence. The Belgian Constitution drafted in 1830 was heralded throughout Europe as a beacon of liberty. Given the history of the twentieth century, Belgians looking back wonder whether the ever-evolving multi-national state and its constitution amended to reflect the reality of federalism should still be held up as a model for other multicultural societies to emulate as they struggle to guarantee individual liberties? I shall argue that it was the freedoms so boldly defined by the nineteenth-century Belgian liberals that caused the fragmentation of the unitary nation-state in the twentieth century.

I. The nineteenth-century Belgian anthem of independence, ‘La Brabançonne,’ recalls the “centuries of slavery” that the Belgians finally threw off in 1830. In fact, the people who would come to call themselves Belgians thrived under ‘foreign’ rule throughout most of their early history. The Austrians, like the Spanish before them, provided protection from neighboring powers, while the people of the Belgian provinces regulated their internal affairs in peace. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the Belgian provinces prospered under Austrian rule. Control of ten provinces had passed from the Spanish to the Austrians in 1715 with the Treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt. For the next seven decades, the Austrian government governed the provinces in absentia. A governor-general, usually a member of the royal family, represented the Austrian government in Brussels, while a plenipotentiary minister carried out the policies of the Austrian

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emperor in the Belgian provinces. Three councils completed the Austrian administrative regime there. The Austrian emperors derived their right to rule from the provincial charters that they formally swore to uphold. The most explicit of the constitutions, the Joyeuse Entrée of 1356, defined the rights of the citizen and the mutual obligations of the ruler and the people. Each province was governed by the Estates chosen by the Church, the nobility, and the commoners. Count de Kaunitz, an Austrian minister, characterized the balance of authority as follows: “Governed according to their own laws, assured of the control of their property and their personal liberty, paying only moderate taxes that they impose on themselves, the Belgians enjoy the precious gifts of a free constitution.” 1 The Belgian economy flourished under Austrian rule. The Prince de Ligne, noting the growth of industry, characterized the quarter of a century between 1748 and 1781 as “the golden age of the [Austrian] Netherlands.”2 In particular, the textile and cotton industries expanded in the area around Ghent, the wool industry around Verviers, and mining and metallurgy in Limburg and along the Sambre river valley. Travelers to the Belgian provinces marveled at agricultural innovations such as crop rotation and the use of new tools that made the Belgian provinces “the garden of Europe.” All of this ceased in the 1780s. The reestablishment of peace between the European powers ended the very profitable Belgian trade monopoly with neutral ports. Furthermore, the succession of Joseph II to his mother Maria Theresa’s throne incited political unrest within the provinces that culminated in a revolution to establish Belgian independence. When Joseph II ascended to the Austrian throne, he announced his plans for sweeping institutional reforms to modernize and homogenize Austria’s territories, including the Belgian provinces. “Neither nationality nor religion should create differences among my subjects,” he proclaimed.3 The ‘enlightened’ emperor declared nine religious orders “useless” and ordered their suppression, forbade burials under churches, limited the carnival season, and announced plans to control the education of bishops he appointed to his own General Seminary. European journalists applauded Joseph’s vision, citing his reforms as part of an enlightened crusade to awaken a backward, prejudiced people. Some Belgians, including Charles Lambert D’Outrepont, a Brussels lawyer recognized as a distinguished legal theorist, praised Joseph II for “showing the light of truth to his subjects” (D’Outrepont, 1786).

1

Count de Kaunitz, cited by Juste, 1864, I, p. 122. Prince de Ligne, cited by Briavoinne, 1840, 14, p. 83. 3 Joseph II, cited by Deplace, 1891, p. 88. 2

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On New Year’s Day 1787 Joseph announced his plans for the reorganization of the entire Belgian judicial and administrative system. He rejected the advice of his counselors to move more slowly, explaining: “In making new regulations to ensure the general well-being, one must not worry about ancient privileges.”4 The emperor intended to eliminate particular interests and to increase the efficiency of the judicial system. Nine ‘circles’ were to replace the provinces, each supervised by an intendant and twelve commissioners appointed by the emperor. Sixty-four new regional courts would be placed under the central direction of one Conseil souverain, also nominated by Joseph II. These reforms attacked one of the most powerful privileged groups in the Austrian Netherlands. The Journal général de l’Europe called this enlightened program of sweeping reforms “a revolution” (Journal général de l’Europe, 1787, p. 251). Joseph observed to the Comte de Ségur: “The people of Brabant are revolting because I wanted to give them just what your [French] nation is so vociferously demanding.”5 However, seen in the perspective of Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, the Austrian emperor, like Philip II, was attempting to impose democratic centralization on a people long accustomed to the autonomy of their provincial privileges (Pirenne, 1926, p. 382). Joseph’s rule in the Austrian Netherlands and the Belgians’ rejection of his reforms demonstrate the contradictions at the core of enlightened despotism. The Estates of the Belgian provinces protested against the Austrian intrusion into their domestic affairs as offensive to their privileges. As Joseph’s former tutor, the Baron de Martini, had warned him: “In these Provinces … the nobles, the bourgeois, and the townspeople have only one soul in all that regards the price that they attach to their ancient Constitution, to their charters, laws and customs—seeing themselves as contracting parties with the Sovereign …[they are] extremely jealous of their real and imagined privileges” (Martini, 1787). The guilds of the central Brabant province led the attack, charging that the Austrian reforms violated the Joyeuse Entrée. They complained that Joseph’s reforms would reduce “the Low Countries that were so rich, so animated, so flourishing …to the image of poverty and distress” (Les Pourquois, 1787). The provincial Estates asserted their constitutional right to withhold their taxes in June 1789; Joseph declared the provincial charters null and void, and disbanded the Estate. The opposition that mobilized in resistance to the Austrians in 1789 was divided into two factions: (i) the traditionalists who followed the

4 5

Joseph II, cited by Gaillard, 1898–1902, p. 352. Joseph II, cited by van Kalken, 1954, p. 464.

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Brussels lawyer, Henri Van der Noot, and (ii) the democrats who coalesced around lawyer Jan François Vonck and Jan Baptiste Verlooy. The democrats and traditionalists shared a common hatred of Joseph II, but differed in their revolutionary goals. The leaders of the Estates, drawing support from the artisans and shopkeepers who made up the guilds, and from government lawyers, fought to preserve their privileges in a stable, prosperous society, as did the church and the nobility. As a mere mortal, Joseph had no right to tamper with the Joyeuse Entrée or the institutions of the Catholic Church, both of which had God himself as their author. Unlike the traditionalists, the Belgian democrats in 1789 did not question the value of Joseph’s reforms. Instead, these lawyers and entrepreneurs challenged the emperor’s right to impose measures against the will of the people. Led by the lawyers Jan Baptist Verlooy and Jan François Vonck, they joined together as ‘Pro Aris et Focis’ (for hearth and home) to appeal to their fellow citizens of all ranks to revolt against the despot and reclaim the sovereignty that rightfully belonged to them. Their pamphlets echoed the natural-rights language of Voltaire, Mably, and Rousseau. The democrats were revolting in order to create a society under the rule of law. Their laws would express the general will and guarantee all citizens equal enjoyment of their natural rights, including property. In contrast to the French revolutionaries, the Belgian democrats noted that they already had a “fixed and permanent Constitution” on which to found their new liberty (‘Trompette anti-autrichienne’). The Belgian democrats saw no need to choose between modernity and tradition; the two were compatible. Pro Aris et Focis and the Estates joined together to fight the Brabant Revolution. While the Estates’ lawyer, Henri Van der Noot, attempted to negotiate support from the English, the Dutch, and the Prussians, Pro Aris et Focis distributed guns, ammunition, and pamphlets throughout the provinces. In the summer of 1789, an army of volunteers recruited by Pro Aris et Focis crossed the border to train in the Dutch village of Breda. In October 1789, the Belgians issued a manifesto of independence from Breda. Written in the language of the American Declaration of Independence, the revolutionary document asserted that the right of the sovereign to rule derived from his duty to serve the interest of his citizens. Following Baron d’Holbach’s Politique naturelle, the Belgians asserted: “There remains always within the body of a nation a general will, an inalienable character, a right preexisting all other rights, the right to national sovereignty” (‘Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon,’ 1789). Joseph II had violated his contract with the Belgian people, reducing

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them to slavery, and so they declared his sovereign right to rule his Belgian subjects void. The Belgians launched their attack on the Austrians on 24 October 1789, the feast day of the Archangel Raphael. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Belgian army, dubbed the “army of the moon” by skeptics, succeeded in driving the Austrian troops from the Belgian provinces in December 1789. While the French were known as a tumultuous people, it had long been assumed that the ten insular Belgian provinces had been lulled to sleep under the benevolent rule of the Austrians in the midst of economic prosperity. The victorious Belgians, traditionalists as well as democrats, scoffed at suggestions that they should seek a king to rule them. The village committees set up by Pro Aris et Focis had effectively organized the local rebellions while the revolutionary committee in Breda coordinated the national revolution. When a journalist reported the progress of the “civil war,” the Abbé de Feller retorted: “Among this people there is only one spirit and one heart …In civil wars citizens fight against citizens, cities battle other cities. Here all is harmonious” (Feller, 1789). The Belgians had fought as a united nation to expel the Austrian tyrant. Under Van der Noot and the cleric Pierre Van Eupen the provincial Belgian Estates reestablished themselves in Brussels in January 1790. The Estates declared the independence of the new Belgian republic the Etats Belgiques Unis and assumed all of the Austrians’ former powers. The Belgian pamphleteers explained their victory as the result of divine intervention. God had assisted his chosen people in driving the Austrian ‘infidels’ from their lands. God had manipulated the course of military affairs “as a lesson to future races” (‘Lettre d’un Ecclésiastique sexagénaire,’ 1790). The leaders of the Etats Belgiques Unis reestablished the privileges of the Estates, pledged to protect the Catholic religion, and surveyed the causes of the recent industrial stagnation in the provinces. They assumed the right to speak for the Belgian nation as a whole, for “the family attached to the Estates” (Talker, n.d.). Theirs was a national corporate order created by God. Scattered throughout the provinces at the head of the army units, the democrats protested against this usurpation of the people’s sovereignty. In the pamphlet battle that ensued between the democrats and the leaders of the Estates, both argued that they represented the interests of the newly independent Belgian nation. The democrats, now calling themselves the Société Patriotique, explained that the newly independent Belgian people had not voted to delegate their sovereignty to the Estates. The Estates had stolen it. In petitions and pamphlets the democrats pointed out that much had changed from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century: the nobility and

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the clergy who had dominated medieval society no longer performed any essential services. The privileged orders of society neither represented nor understood the interests of the vast majority of the people. “Isn’t it ridiculous to see peasants, that class that is so necessary to society, represented by monks with whom they share no common interests?,” one pamphleteer asked (Dinne, 1791, p. 192). The Estates survived as a relic of the old feudal system. Some moderate democrats called for a change in the representational system to give a voice to the educated and propertied interests. Echoing the Abbé Sieyés, they called for a doubling of the Third Estate to include the most useful classes in society in the governance of the Belgian nation. Other leaders of the Société patriotique called for the complete overhaul of Belgian society to free it from the shackles of medieval custom and tradition. In its successful revolution, they explained, the Belgian people had won their primitive liberty, returning them to Rousseau’s state of nature. They called for a new constitutional assembly of the kind the Americans had established in 1776. By May 1790, the Estates had forced most members of the Société patriotique to flee across the French border. Austrian troops returned in October 1790 to defeat the ragged army of the divided Belgian republic. In October 1792, a number of Belgians, including members of the Estates, applauded French General Charles Dumouriez’s successful assault on the Austrians. The Brussels Société des Amis de la Liberté et de l’Egalité invited Dumouriez to their first meeting in the Church of the Jesuits. The president of the Belgian Société, Alexandre Balza, toasted the end of the “reign of error” and proclaimed that the French had “illuminated the lamp of liberty for the people, raising the people to the height of their rights, the sacred and inalienable rights of nature that made all beings equal and free.”6 The so-called Belgian “Jacobins” planted trees of liberty, abolished old tribunals, decreed an end to guild monopolies, and recruited an army for the new Belgian republic. The subsequent election of a Provisional Government in 1792 brought the Belgian democrats to power for the first time in five years of revolution. The Provisional Representatives pledged themselves to rule in the name of the Belgian people whose inalienable and imprescriptible rights they would defend. They also called for all the Belgian people to unite as one nation rising above the provincial loyalties that had divided them for too long. “No longer should we call ourselves the Flemish or the Brabançons, but the Belgians, the friends of liberty,” they proclaimed (‘Adresse des amis de la liberté,’ n.d.).

6

Moniteur (28 November 1792), XIV: 580; and Journal de la société des Amis de la Liberté (20 November 1792).

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Among the first rights that the Provisional Government moved to establish was economic liberty. The new Belgian government voted an end to the guilds’ monopoly, allowing the free circulation of goods. “The well-being of individuals will assure the prosperity and the strength of the nation” (Chapel, n.d.), they declared. They guaranteed all citizens equal access to public employment and abolished the old judicial tribunals. The provisional government soon found itself squeezed between the Jacobins and the leaders of the old Estates. The traditionalists protested that Belgians wanted to reestablish the provincial institutions that had always assured their prosperity and happiness. The threats to the Church had alarmed the clergy, while the artisans worried about the Provisional Representatives’ plans to open the Scheldt river for trade and to liberalize commercial regulations. They appealed to the lessons of historical experience and to the corporate image of shared prosperity. “Every nation has the right to be free in its own way,” Van der Noot explained in his ‘Address to the Belgian People’ (Van der Noot, 1792). “The good French celebrate liberty under the colors Blue, White and Red; the good Belgians under the colors Black,Yellow, and Red.” Curiously, in contrasting the Belgian experience with that of the neighboring French, Van der Noot echoed the democrats’ invocation of the Belgian nation rather than the group of provinces. The Société des Amis de liberté et de l’Egalité, on the other hand, complained that the Provisional Government was proceeding too slowly. Its members pledged to eradicate the religious fanaticism of their fellow citizens. The courageous French had liberated their neighbors, the Belgian Jacobins proclaimed, so the Belgians should not retreat into the shadows of privilege and slavery. After the French declared their intention in a December decree completely to rewrite Belgian laws and to punish dissent harshly, the majority of the Provisional Representatives turned against the French Revolution. The Belgians asked why they should be expected to achieve a revolution in several months that had taken the French over four years. Furthermore, why should a free and sovereign people not choose its own revolutionary path and elect representatives who would be free to act in the general interest of the new nation. Foreign models could not be imposed on a sovereign people. The Provisional Representatives explained in their petition to the Convention that the Belgians had never suffered the abuses endured by the French under the old regime and so needed no radical revolution. The French disbanded the Provisional Government and called new elections. Victorious Austrian troops reentered Belgium in March 1793, greeted by crowds singing parodies of the Marseillaise. Not long after, in 1794, the French reconquered the Belgian provinces.

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II. In 1815, following the defeat of the French at Waterloo, the European powers united the Belgian provinces with the Netherlands under the rule of Dutch King William I. William decreed that Dutch would be the only legal language for the conduct of public affairs in the Flemish region in the North and required that Dutch be taught as a second language in the Francophone areas of the former Belgian provinces in the South. Like the French revolutionaries, William believed that a unified nation needed to use a single language. The Constitution of the United Netherlands also introduced religious equality and freedom, and established state schools. The young Belgian journalist Louis De Potter labeled King William’s plans for the fusion of the two peoples “foreign domination.” De Potter cautioned the Dutch “to organize your opinions, your religion, your schools as you want, but leave us the liberty to observe our own. You may keep your customs, your ways, your language, but leave us our own language, ways, and customs” (De Potter, 1829). It was not only the French speakers who opposed the language policies of the Dutch king. Leading Belgian Catholic intellectuals argued that Flemish was a distinct language. Opposition to the Dutch king surfaced everywhere throughout the Belgian provinces. In 1829 liberal and Catholic leaders coalesced in their call for a free press, religious schools, and the right to use the language of their choice. Inheritors of the traditionalist arguments of the Brabant Revolution, the Catholics supported the maintenance of a state church and argued for the decentralization of the government. The liberals, building on the appeals of the eighteenth-century democrats, called for freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, ministerial responsibility, and a true parliamentary regime. Forty years after the Brabant Revolution, however, the Catholics no longer called for a restoration of the ancien régime, and the liberals no longer feared its resurgence. The “union of oppositions” came together to fight for liberty. William planned to build a Netherlands nation; instead he united the Belgian opposition in defense of their traditional rights as a sovereign people. The second revolution for Belgian independence was ignited in August 1830 by the performance of Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici, which had evoked the insurrection of Naples against Spanish king Philip IV. The audience emerged from the opera house in the center of Brussels singing tributes to liberty.Youths joined them in the streets for a night of rioting. Attacking the houses of Dutch government leaders, they drove the troops back to the Place du Palais. Once again, economic distress fueled the revolution. A severe winter and poor harvests exacerbated the crisis of overproduction, resulting in

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bankruptcies, low wages, and unemployment throughout the Belgian provinces. The Brussels riots rapidly spread to other Belgian cities. In the industrialized region around Liège, workers invaded factories, smashing machines, while crowds gathered outside the Palais communal on 20 September, chanting “To arms! Bread, work, De Potter, and liberty” (van Kalken, 1954, p. 549). In response to the unrest, the Dutch allowed the Belgian bourgeoisie to establish a civil guard to reestablish order. Although most Belgian leaders had been fighting for a list of specific reforms rather than independence, the General Assembly subsequently voted in favor of separation. The Dutch king ignored the vote, assuming that only a small minority of his southern subjects supported the mutiny. The Belgian leaders of the revolt pressed their demands for freedom of the press and education, ministerial responsibility, and full representation of the Belgians in the government and parliament of the United Netherlands. A club, the Réunion centrale, presided over by the Bruxellois E. Ducpétiaux, with Charles Rogier from Liège and P. Rodenbach from Bruges as vice presidents, was organized in Brussels. Deputations from Brussels and Liège traveled to the Hague to meet with William on 29 August 1830. At the same time, William dispatched his sons, William and Frederick, south, at the head of his troops. Frederick met a Belgian deputation in Vilvoorde, just outside Brussels. When their negotiations failed, Prince Frederick resolved to enter Brussels with his troops. In the ensuing four-day battle, the civic guard of Brussels, armed workers, and coteries of peasants with pitchforks drove the ten thousand Dutch troops out of the city. Belgian officers abandoned their Dutch regiments. The revolt had become a war for national independence. The Belgian patriots looked to their common political history as residents of a distinct region who had governed themselves with relative autonomy for two hundred years. Language differences did not separate the residents of Flemish provinces from the Walloon provinces in the far south. The Brabant flag fluttered from rooftops in Brussels, as the Belgians declared their independence and separation from the Netherlands. Once again, the Belgian clergy proclaimed the victory of the chosen people. Patriots from throughout Belgium flocked to Brussels to organize an independent government. Liberals and Catholics joined together to declare Belgian independence from the Netherlands. The Provisional Government appointed a commission to draft a new constitution and on 10 October 1830 called for direct elections for a National Congress of two hundred delegates. Even before the Congress convened, the Provisional Government proclaimed the Belgian liberties of freedom of education, the press, religion, and association. Negotiations to secure full European recognition of Belgian independence would take another nine years.

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Dominated by a moderate center, the new Congress decided that Belgium should be a parliamentary monarchy and moved expeditiously to organize the government of the new nation and to find a king. Catholics and Liberals each made concessions in the spirit of unity. They set up a Chamber of Representatives and a Senate with a franchise for 46,000 men (one voter in every 95 inhabitants)—one of the most liberal in Europe. In the debates over the framing of the new Belgian constitution, the unique Belgian fusion of Catholicism and Liberalism is evident in a way it had not been in 1789. Above all, the Belgian Constitution of 1830 protected the rights of the individual. The responsibilities of the Belgian state were carefully delimited to safeguard the individual freedoms of the press, religion, education, and language in the archetypal liberal charter. As one delegate, observed: “In my eyes, the greatest merit of the Congress was to have looked liberty straight in the eyes without being frightened.”7 In fact, the Belgian Constitution of 1830 guaranteed many of the rights for which eighteenth-century democrats had struggled in the Brabant Revolution. It widened the franchise to include propertied and educated individuals and established a parliamentary system. The most important difference was the decision to become a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic, and that was dictated in part by the European powers meeting in London. The Congress approved the new Constitution in February 1831. Belgium survived the 1848 revolutions as “the tranquil little corner” in the middle of Europe. The Belgian government suppressed the agitation of a small number of radical groups and expelled foreign socialists such as Karl Marx. It also met the demands for a more liberal suffrage, enlarging the electorate from 55,000 to 79,000 men. The newly enlarged Chamber confidently declared: “The ideas of the Revolution can go tour the world, they need not stop in Belgium.”8

III. In twentieth-century Belgium, liberalism and nationalism have worked at cross purposes. The linguistic liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of 1830 and the freedom guaranteed to individuals to express themselves in the language of their choice have spawned regional identities that today pose the threat of the dissolution of the Belgian state.

7 8

M. Desmanet, cited in Juste, 1880, p. 429. Delfosse, cited by van Kalken, 1954, pp. 605–606.

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Before the Brabant Revolution, the Belgians in the southern provinces spoke French, and those in the north, for the most part, spoke Dutch (or Flemish). As one pamphleteer explained: “People who know our Provinces will doubtless not be surprised to find in our writings a mixture of Flemish, Latin, and French …What might pass in other nations as a ridiculous motley conglomeration will for the Belgians constitute an amusing and useful variety” (‘Mercure Flandrico-Latino-Gallico,’ n.d.). In fact, few Belgians seemed particularly concerned with language. Eighteenth-century correspondents would begin their letter in Dutch and then inadvertently continue in French when they turned the page or vice versa. An eighteenth-century Belgian who did care about language was Jan Baptiste Verlooy, one of the founders of Pro Aris et Focis. He had articulated many of the most liberal ideas of individualism—including freedom of conscience and the right of property—in his pamphlet ‘Zyn Geloof, Vryheid en Eygendom in Gevaer?’ But he is remembered today as the author of ‘Verhandeling op d’onacht der moederlyke Tael in de Nederlanden,’ a tract which he published in 1788. Verlooy called on the Belgian people to return to their native Flemish as a national language. He protested against the elite’s use of French in governance and administration: the ‘verfransing’ of Flemish literary circles deprived the Flemish people of its native culture. Verlooy recognized a tie between nationality and language. Historically, he concluded, Dutch, not French, was the Belgian language of liberty. After the defeat of the Brabant Revolution, the French imposed the use of an official language—French—in Belgium for the first time. The French associated language with nationality. The Abbé Grégoire proclaimed the unity of language to be an integral part of the revolution. The Dutch language policies designed to reverse the ‘verfransing’ of the Flemish elite had little real effect. A group of lawyers from Ghent informed the Dutch king in 1821: “The reunion of Belgium with France resulted in the spread of the use of the French language in our province [Flanders]. Introduced in education, of which it forms the base, in the courts, where it alone is heard, and in all public administration, it has become to some extent identified with our culture, and after thirty years has become the normal language of civil and commercial relations.” 9 The Belgian Constitution of 1830 guaranteed the freedom of individual citizens to use the language of their choice. In the spirit of liberalism, the founders of the new Belgian nation decreed in Article 23 of the Constitution: “The use of language shall be optional. The matter may be regulated only by law and only for acts of public authority and

9

Cited in Cosemans, 1950, p. 48.

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judicial proceedings” (McBain and Rodgers, 1923). Louis De Potter proclaimed that complete liberty would lead to true equality in Belgium, a nation composed of individuals. The liberal framers of the Belgian Constitution conceived Article 23 in a spirit consistent with Verlooy’s pamphlet ‘Zyn Geloof, Vryheid en Eygendom in Gevaer?’ Ironically, however, by guaranteeing individuals the right to express themselves in their chosen language, the Belgian Constitution allowed the French-speaking elites to continue to govern and to write in French. Not long after independence, a Flemish movement developed to protest the de facto exclusion of the Flemish language and its culture in the new Belgian nation. In 1840, 30,000 Flemings petitioned for their right to be administered and governed in “low German.” In the 1870s and 1880s the Belgian Parliament finally sanctioned the use of Flemish in administration, justice, and secondary education in the northern provinces. In 1898 the so-called ‘equality law’ recognized Flemish as an official language alongside French. The successes of the Flemish movement, not surprisingly, triggered the existence of a French-speaking one. Initially a romantic movement, the Walloons, as the inhabitants of the southern provinces called themselves, protested the growing bilingualism that threatened Belgium’s national unity. Linguistic individualism led to the identification of distinct linguistic communities at war with each other. The two regional movements strengthened in the twentieth century, fed by the tensions of two world wars and economic pressures. Citing verses written in the middle of the nineteenth century, Reginald de Schryver reminds us that “In 1830 all the inhabitants called themselves Belgians, even while speaking various languages … ‘Belgian’ became a family name, and ‘Flemish’ and ‘Walloon’ were added as given names” (de Schryver, 1981, p. 32). Only after the Second World War did ‘Walloon’ and ‘Fleming’ become the most significant forms of identification. As the Belgian nation has increasingly fragmented into two regions and as the Belgian constitution is being rewritten to acknowledge this new reality, Belgians have reconceptualized their past. Jean Stengers explains: “Those who doubt the viability or even the existence of a Belgian nation project their doubts into the past” (Stengers, 1995, 141). Remarkably few Belgians today acknowledge any shared national past. They do not remember a time when ‘Belgian’ was their family name. Rather than ‘de belgen’ or ‘les belges,’ Belgians today identify themselves as ‘les wallons’ and ‘de vlamingen.’ In fact, neither of these terms referred to any collective identity before 1830. Although the term ‘wallon’ was used as early as the fifteenth century, it did not invoke a cohesive

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ethnic group. ‘Vlamingen’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant those people who spoke the German dialects of medieval Flanders. From both a Flemish and a Walloon perspective, the national unity of 1830 seems artificial, imposed by the European powers from the outside. Liberal revolutionaries, however, clearly perceived the Belgian Revolution of 1830, as they did the Brabant Revolution of 1789, to be national revolutions. In both cases, they celebrated the legendary history of the brave, virtuous Belgian people who prized their liberty. Perhaps John Stuart Mill was right, then, when he warned about the fragmentation of a nation with intermediate loyalties. Or perhaps, as I have argued, the liberal state itself gave birth to regional identities by allowing individual freedom. But if liberal nationalism in Belgium resulted in an intolerant nationalism that threatens to destroy a small state at the center of the European Union, then the Belgian example may not bring us closer to solving the dilemma faced by multi-national states in Europe today. Like the peoples of central Europe, the Belgians are struggling to build a state that respects the rights of minority individuals within distinct linguistic regions to define a nation composed of different cultures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘Adresse des amis de la liberté et de l’égalité à Bruxelles aux Flamands.’ n. d. Bibliotheek Rijsuniversiteit Gent. Belgian Constitution of 1830, The. 1923. In The New Constitutions of Europe, ed. H.L. McBain and Lindsay Rodgers. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. Briavoinne, N. 1840. Mémoire sur l'état de la population, des fabriques, des manufactures et du commerce dans les Provinces des Pays-Bas, depuis Albert et Isabelle jusqu'à la fin du siècle dernier. Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique. Chapel, J. J. n.d. ‘Lettre et Mémoire sur le Commerce des Pays-Bas Autrichiens,’ Révolution belge, vol. 66. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. Cosemans, Alex. 1950. ‘Bestuur, gezelschapsleven en taal toestanden historisch gezien,’ Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal en Geschiedenis 4: 48. Deplace, L. 1891. Joseph II et la Révolution brabançonne. Bruges: Beyaert–Stoire De Schryver, 1981. ‘The Belgian Revolution and the Emergence of Belgium’s Biculturalism,’ in Conflict and Coexistence in Belgium. The Dynamics of a Culturally Divided Society, ed. Arend Lijphart. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California. Dinne, E. J. 1791. Mémoire historique et pièces justificatives pour M. Van der Mersch. Lille: chez Jacquez. D’Outrepont, Charles Lambert. 1786. Des empèchements dirimant le Contrat de mariage dans les pays-Bas Autrichiens selon l’édit de da majesté l’Empereur et Roi. Brussels: no publisher.

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Feller, Abbé de. 1789. Journal historique et littéraire, (1 December 1789). Etats Belgiques Unis 181. Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels. Gaillard, Arthur. 1898–1902. Le Conseil de Brabant, vol. 1. Brussels: J. Lebègue & cie. Journal général de l’Europe 352 (5 April 1787). Juste, Theodore. 1864. Histoire des États Généraux des Pays-Bas, 1465–1790. Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe & cie. ———. 1880. Le Congrés national, vol. 1. Brussels: C. Muquardt. Kalken, Frans van. 1954. Histoire de la Belgique. Brussels: Office de publicité. ‘Les Pourquois ou questions pour une grande Affaire pour ceux qui n’ont que trois minutes à y donner’ (Brussels, 1787), in Révolution belge, vol. 103, pamphlet 4. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. ‘Lettre d’un Ecclésiastique sexagénaire aux Doyens ruraux & curés de la Belgique-unie’ (30 January 1790), Varia, vol. 335, pamphlet 63. Archief Abdij Bornem, Bornem, Belgium. Lijphart, Arend, ed. 1981. Conflict and Coexitence in Belgium: The Dynamics of a Culturally Divided Society. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California. ‘Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon,’ Révolution belge, vol. 72, pamphlet 12. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. Martini, Baron. 1787. Letter to Kaunitz (17 May). Liasse 610 B, Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Brussels. ‘Mercure Flandrico-Latino-Gallico,’ Révolution belge, vol. 19. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. Murphy, Alexander. 1988. The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium. Chicago: University of Chicago, Committee on Geographical Studies. Noot, Henri Van der. 1792. ‘Adresse au Peuple Belge’ (1 December), Etats Belgiques Unis 186. Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels. Pirenne, Henri. 1926. Histoire de la Belgique, vol. 5. Brussels: Maurice Lamertin. Polasky, Janet. 1987. Revolution in Brussels, 1787–1793. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique. Potter, Louis de. 1829. ‘Lettre à Démophile.’ Brussels: no publisher. Stengers, Jean. 1995. ‘La révolution de 1830,’ in Les grands mythes de l’histoire de Belgique, de Flandre et de Wallonie, ed. Anne Morelli. Brussels: Editions Vie ouvrière. Talker, George. n. d. ‘Quelques réflexions politicopratiques ou adieux à Bruxelles,’ Acquisitions récentes 4/13. Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels. Tassier, Suzanne. 1930. Les démocrates belges de 1789. Brussels: M. Lamertin. ———. 1934. Histoire de la Belgique sous l’occupation française. Brussels: Falk G. van Campenhout. ‘Trompette anti-autrichienne,’ Révolution belge, vol. 102, pamphlet 20. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. Witte, Els and Harry Van Velthoven. 1999. Language and Politics. The Belgian Case Study in a Historical Perspective. Brussels: VUB University Press. Witte, Els, J. Craeybeckx, and A. Meynen. 1997. Politieke Geschiedenis van Belgie. Brussels: VUB University Press.

II. Central Europe

Unity or Liberty? German Liberalism Founding an Empire (1850–79) GÁBOR ERDÔDY

The evolution of German national consciousness has in modern times been influenced by attempts to create national unity, as well as by successes achieved in the course of the assertion of liberal–democratic rights—though failures experienced in this connection and their interpretation have also been important. A romantic, heroic Sonderweg concept has dominated scholarship since the second half of the nineteenth century, coexisting with one contrasting interpretation of German history as a provincial, underdeveloped, backward and anarchical variant of the European mainstream. Since the mid-1970s, however, a historical standpoint based on the results of research into modernization has increasingly gained ground, presenting nineteenth-century German historical development as an autonomous attempt at modernization in a unique region. Instead of seeking to justify or refute different prejudices, the adherents of this view have attempted to find out why things happened as they did. It is well known that the revolution of 1848 constituted the dawning of a new era in German history. Although it did not bring about a crucial turning point in the development of national identity, different political schools often claimed to be the guardians of its legacy when striving to legitimize themselves historically. For this reason, its evaluation has largely been influenced by simplified, prejudiced interpretations undertaken with a view to exploiting it for everyday political aims. Research work and discourse have steadily focused on national and international connections. In the past three decades socio-historical analyses in Germany and in the United States, from Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche to James J. Sheehan, have become prevalent, presenting the revolution in terms of long-term modernization processes rather than as an ‘inorganic’ historical improvisation. Langewiesche defines the German revolution of 1848 as an attempt to eliminate a modernization crisis involving three elements: integration, legitimation, and participation. In his view, the essence of the revolution lies in its pursuit of new forms of political power. It was also in the course of this crisis that the demand for the establishment of a national

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and constitutional state emerged. The contemporary German liberal and political élite failed to meet this dual challenge, however. Although the constitution adopted in Frankfurt on 28 March 1849—a masterpiece of classic German liberalism—represented the climax of nineteenthcentury German constitutional development, its coming into effect was made dependent on Prussia, whose previous political behavior could hardly have given rise to much optimism in this regard. The hopes of the spring of 1848 soon disappeared. The Central European national constitutional movements—above all the Hungarian one— were doomed in their struggle against the counter-revolutionary Habsburg–Romanov coalition. After 1848–49 the development of European state formations was determined by the repressive policies of the victorious counter-revolution. The political supremacy of monarchic executive power based on anti-liberalism was unambiguous in the German region as well, but it was inconceivable that a return could be made to the pre-revolutionary situation, to governing the region without a constitution (apart from an aborted attempt by the Habsburgs).

I. The Olmütz treaty, signed on 28 November 1850, put an end to Prussia’s rise, evident from spring 1849, following Austria’s preoccupation with the Hungarian events, so giving a gleam of hope to the advocates of the lesser German empire and seemingly restoring the pre-1848 state of affairs. It confirmed Austria as the president of the confederation, but it was no longer possible to revive Metternich’s mechanism, which involved a sort of tacit Habsburg–Hohenzollern duality. In the years to come, Vienna made several attempts to have its leading position acknowledged in practice, and tried to increase its weight within the German Confederation by incorporating the whole Habsburg Empire into it. To suppress domestic dissent, Franz Joseph, alone among the rulers of the German states, officially declared in the New Year’s Eve letter-patent of 1851 that he had returned to governing without a constitution. Although the other monarchs in the region retained the constitutional form of state, they did not preserve the system of popular representation introduced in 1848. Expecting to have dual hegemony officially recognized, Prussia had the imposed constitution of December 1848—a classic document of post-revolutionary constitutionalism—confirmed in a revised form in 1850. This declared the king to be the true head of both the executive and the legislative power, endowing him with the right of consent and veto in legislation, and the authority to make appointments to ministries independently of Parliament. The main feature of the constitu-

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tionalism of the Nachmärz was its overt anti-liberal attitude after 1850, providing ‘constitutional’ frameworks for the consolidation of conservative absolutism, whereas the constitutionalism of the Vormärz was imbued with the openness and dynamism of developing liberalism. Although “authoritarian constitutionalism”—an apt term coined by Lothar Gall—represented conservative isolationism, by having at least a limited franchise and some parliamentary bodies and organizations, it also helped open up channels of publicity to those social forces which fundamentally questioned the status quo, thereby unwittingly contributing to the emergence of autonomous civil organizations. It also played a pioneering role in shaping relations among the European states. After a temporary revival of the former policy of the balance of powers, it committed itself to the concept of the national state, adopting the European program of nationalization. By bringing the program of the national state to the fore, it sought to achieve favorable internal changes, and to defend and reinforce the positions thus gained by returning to the traditional order. The defeat of 1848–49 rocked the political position of liberalism. Facing the conservative government of Manteuffel in the 1850s, the opposition party headed by Virchov, Patow, and Auerswald had little parliamentary influence. It took a long time for it to recover from its shock and paralysis; hiding behind a mask of passive resistance, it began to evaluate events, draw conclusions, and set new tasks. In the transitional period, the direction—and the new attempt at self-identification—of German liberalism, as in the rest of Europe and in America, was characterized by the liberal creed and a belief in progress, alongside the uncertainty caused by liberalism’s failure to live up to its own expectations. Gall has shown that the economic take-off of the 1850s was based on the prosperity of small businesses, entailing the strengthening of the social and economic influence of the bourgeois middle classes. They thought they were seeing the realization of the dream of a bourgeois ‘golden age’ envisioned in the Vormärz. The resulting consciousness of progress (Fortschrittsbewusstsein) was also felt among artisans. Self-awareness based on real performance, the rapid, seemingly unstoppable development of culture, science, technology, and the economy seemed to convince the representatives of liberalism, even with their subjected political status, of the omnipotent power of enlightenment. Their experiences assured them of the long-term victory of liberalism, while the conclusions inferred from 1848–49 led them to modify their strategy to suit the new reality. Amidst political repression and the swift changes affecting society and the economy, and lacking the nationwide political forums indispensable for thinking in terms of the whole German nation, the liberalism of the Nachmärz had to address the experiences of 1848 and adapt

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its main principles and goals to empirical facts and changing circumstances. Temporarily, it reduced its immediate political ambitions to a minimum: “to defend what can be, and what is worth being, defended.” Its behavior was principally characterized by a tendency towards depoliticization and the ascendancy of economic interests. This entailed an increase in the role of the capitalist middle classes and the retreat of the bourgeois intellectuals, who developed a ‘wait and see’ attitude. Although the Borussian (Prussian) mentality was not the only possible alternative for post-revolutionary liberalism, the decisive tendency of liberal ‘real-political’ thought involved a resignation from ideology and an approach which, as early as the 1850s, derived the essence of liberal efforts from economic needs. In other words, it restricted itself to setting material goals which seemed concretely attainable.

II. A significant development in the political power relations of Prussia came in 1858: on 7 October Archduke William was made regent because Frederick William IV was gravely ill. The heir to the throne firmly rejected his father’s reactionary conservative proposal to suspend the constitution. Already in 1854, with the support of the reform conservatives led by Behmann-Hollweg, he had criticized his father’s policies for inducing a state of permanent crisis. In an effort to ward off the revolutionary dangers of absolutist government, he urged the “positive acknowledgment” of the constitution and the introduction of flexible policy-making that would preserve the power of the crown within set limits—without seeking any extension of those limits—and promote cooperation with the moderate liberals. He was convinced that the domestic stability and power of Prussia could not be ensured unless absolutism was ended before the outbreak of a revolution, and the liberal forces co-opted into the power structure. He tried to establish this constitutionalist system—based on a state of equilibrium—by creating a solid background of constitutional law. The involvement of the liberals in government was also justified by their successes in the elections of 12–13 November 1857. This promised to serve as the springboard—on the basis of mutual concessions—for a joint cabinet of reform conservatives and moderate liberals. The hopes related to the liberal ‘New Era’ were heightened by the speech of the regent delivered on 8 November. Although, as expected, William did not declare a radical break with the past and was wary of adopting liberal principles—what is more, he said that the nation’s chief interest lay in strengthening its “healthy and firm conservative foundations”—his speech also implied a number of long-awaited reforms: “In Germany, Prussia must aspire after moral conquests with a wise domestic

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legislation, with the apprehension of every moral moment and catching at such unifying elements as the customs union … The world must know that Prussia is ready to support law everywhere. With persevering, consistent, and, if need be, energetic activity in politics, wedded to wisdom and sobriety, the authority and power of Prussia must be secured, something which could not be achieved solely by material means.” Nicknamed—with much bitterness—‘Kartätschenprinz’ (Prince of Grapeshot) after his role in 1848, William’s firmness of purpose nevertheless earned the appreciation of many liberal politicians. The journal of the Prussian ultra-liberals, Preussische Jahrbücher, which first appeared in 1858, hailed the event as the perfect victory of the constitution and the reinforcement of civil liberty, comparing its significance to the reform drives launched in 1806 and the convocation of the Prussian united Landtag in 1847. Many were aware, however, that a policy of “moral conquests” was highly vulnerable, since the framework within which an attempt would be made to assert it was a state based on the army, the bureaucracy, and the Junkers. The spirit of authoritarian constitutionalism saw to it that the liberals would have no constitutional guarantee whatsoever that they would be allowed to participate in confronting vested interests on the one hand and promoting equal rights and opportunities on the other. While it was the constitutional right of the monarch to dissolve the Parliament at any time in the event of a conflict (so enabling him to interrupt the experiment at will), the only weapon—and a very blunt one, at that—the liberals had was a refusal to grant supplies or to vote for the state budget. Nonetheless, they subjected their policy to the principle expressed in Max Duncker’s slogan “No pressure, please” in order to prevent the regent from falling under the sway of the conservatives. Events soon showed that the initial optimism had been unfounded. The conservative front launched a counter-attack even before the investiture of the ministers, and tensions soon intensified between the liberalmajority house of representatives, the feudalistic upper chamber, and William, who was under conservative influence. The conservative offensive unfolded around the reform of national defense. Their proposal called for the legal sanctioning of a military leadership free from ministerial veto and parliamentary control. That they were gaining ground was evident from the fact that the liberal defense minister Bonin was dismissed and replaced by the conservative Roon. In the meantime, the liberals’ readiness for compromise was also awakened by the failure to introduce the reforms promised at the outset. The crisis before the outbreak of constitutional conflict clearly proves the anti-liberal nature of Prussian authoritarian constitutionalism. Since the monarch insisted on the unconditional capitulation of the liberals, they had no choice but take up the fight with little certainty of the outcome.

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A more favorable atmosphere towards the end of the 1850s brought better results in Southern Germany. The change of the Bavarian government in 1859 opened the way to a string of positive reforms, resulting in the finalization of Jewish emancipation, the elaboration of a new trade law, and the separation of the administration and the judiciary. The changes in Baden were even more far-reaching. The LameyRoggenbach ministry installed in April 1869 issued the most progressive laws of the time. Its reform of the administration began to pull down the walls of bureaucratic absolutism at the local government level. Its legal reform of 1864 turned the principality into the epitome of a liberal constitutional state for the whole of Germany and an experimental ground for liberal government. The new government coupled its progressive domestic policy with an initiative to renew international relations also on a liberal basis. The ‘liberal monarchic group,’ a loose association led by the Archduke and rallying the younger generations of the Central German dynasties, allowed some glimmer of hope of a liberal counterplay outside Prussia under the theoretical guidance of foreign minister Franz von Roggenbach.

III. Although the liberals were intent on avoiding the outbreak of a crisis, the inauguration of the Bismarck cabinet on 22 September 1862 left them with no alternative. The cause of German liberalism seemed hopeless: in vain did they formulate the national interest, when the rulers of Austria and Prussia were disinclined to act upon their recommendations. This hopelessness was further enhanced by Austria’s conservative initiative in 1853 to reform the German Confederation, which left no way out and ended in fiasco. The struggle against the court in Berlin, which proceeded with the reform of the army using extra-parliamentary means, was led by the first organized party in Germany, the German Progressive Party, founded on 6 June 1861. Its program started out from the negation of the unsuccessful ultra-liberal tactic, moderation reiterated ad nauseam. It coupled national political goals with a demand for the basic principles of the constitutional state, envisioning its realization through the strong power concentrated in the hands of liberal Prussia. The reform package of the Progressive Party opened a new way of liberalism toward liberal democracy in Germany. The program set the following as the most pressing goals: the introduction of communal self-government at district and provincial levels; true independence for judges; revision of industrial law in the interest of liberating economic resources; implementation of the greatest possible economies in the army; comprehensive reform of the Herrenhaus (House of Lords); and

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the introduction of ministerial responsibility. The program—which had Vormärz roots, with an admixture of democratic elements, while remaining wary of restoring a continuity with 1848—proposed to combat the recurrence of the ‘New Era’ by parliamentarizing the system of government, extending the competence of the House of Representatives and strictly regulating executive power. A key issue for the solution of the German issue—the need to coordinate liberty with unity—was not, however, settled in an unambiguous fashion. The majority of liberals shared Oppenheim’s position: “We would all gladly sacrifice a whole period of freedom for the creation of German unity, if we were not fully aware that unity can be achieved only along the road to liberty.” In contrast with those who insisted on basic liberal rights, Twesten was not isolated in his views. In June 1862 he declared: “Should a Prussian minister enter and say: I’ve demolished border stones, I’ve violated the law of nations, I’ve torn agreements to pieces just like Count Cavour did!—well, gentlemen, I think, we would not condemn him … on the contrary, we would erect a monument in honor of him…” In this depressing climate of helplessness the program of ‘Cavourization’ was created, with Baumgarten—who was to play an important role in 1866—as its main advocate. The Progressive Party, turning away from the liberal democratic tradition as represented by Vincke, emerged as a movement of coalition, rallying democratic and antidemocratic liberals alike (Waldeck, Duncker, Virchov, and Schulze von Delitzsch on the one hand; Twesten, Mommsen, Unruh, and Forckenbeck on the other). Its mainstay was the middle and petty bourgeoisie in the Rhineland and Westphalia, but it gained considerable support among capitalist entrepreneurs as well. The party headquarters were based in Berlin, then regarded as the most solid bastion of the party. Its Cologne center, determined to coordinate the liberal left and the democrats, and less enthusiastic about cooperation with the moderate liberals, was also a considerable force, going public with a more radical list of demands than the party’s official program. Headed by Hermann Becker and Georg Jung, it declared itself the party of the people. They were more active than the Berlin center in launching mass demonstrations. They regarded the constitutional conflict as a struggle for power and wished to lay the foundations of genuine parliamentarianism with the unconditional and full realization of the freedom of the press and the right of combination and assembly, the transformation of the Herrenhaus, and the establishment of a democratic, people’s army. In the background of the extraordinary influence of the Progressive Party was Central Europe’s largest mass movement, the Nationalverein (National Association), which worked as ‘auxiliary troops,’ paving the way for the Progressive Party to become a mass party. Founded in September 1859, the Nationalverein was orga-

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nized to support the goals proclaimed at the outset of the New Era and to promote the constitutional small German solution, which was based on Prussia and excluded the Austrian Empire from the newly created Germany, as a means to solving the national problem. The opponents of the small German solution were gathered in the Reformverein (Reform Association), established in October 1862, and involving exponents of a wide range of political trends from the right to the left, with a powerful liberal-democratic element from Württemberg. The Reformverein refused to establish contacts with the rising liberal parties, however. The radicalization of liberalism did not meet with the approval of the ‘Wirtschaftsbürgertum’—the moneyed middle class actively involved in the economy—whose members were mainly gathered in the Prussian economic chambers. They criticized the recent revaluation of political considerations and urged the rapid termination of the constitutional conflict, blaming the progressive liberals for its protraction. Although in principle they did not reject the improvement of the constitution, they staunchly opposed the idea of true parliamentarianism. Bismarck tried to harden their attitude by reinforcing their position. In 1862 he signed a free trade agreement with France, reviving the effective Prussian political tactic of 1818 and 1834, namely compensating the middle class for their lack of political rights by giving them economic benefits. In fact, it was not the intention of the leadership of the Progressive Party to create tensions. Their strategy, as accurately worded by Schulze von Delitzsch in 1863, was to “make a coherent alliance of all the liberal elements—that is our task now: to prepare quietly for the fight, and not to trigger it. First and foremost: patience.” They called for moderation, awaiting peaceful developments, while at the same time becoming ever more self-confident. The program and activities of the Progressive Party constituted an attempt to break out of the subordinate position of Nachmärz liberalism, and, after the revision of their self-restricting strategy, which had failed in the New Era, they contributed to the laying of the first foundations of democracy. The outcome of the fight for a more democratic version of civil and national transformation depended principally upon an extra-parliamentary situation. Schulze von Delitzsch’s Labour policy was aimed at creating a solid foundation for this experiment, expanding the party’s mass base. It is true that with the rapid progress of industrialization, the strengthening of the workers’ movement, and the negative experiences of 1848–49, the rejection of the social-egalitarian tendency in the liberal movement from the 1850s was obvious (Gugel). Underlying this process was the economic boom and industrialization, which

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radically transformed the social structure and the mentality and selfevaluation of the various social classes. The economic grounds for general emancipatory aspirations were shaken, the prospect of a homogeneous society shattered (as foreshadowed by 1848–49), and class-specific considerations came to the fore. All this required that liberalism should express a clear class position—as Twesten put it: “both against the restrictive measures of the government and the violence latent on the side of the masses.” While preparing for a war on two fronts, the majority of liberals were not averse to seeking to recommend themselves to a number of classes at once: Georg Gottfried and Schulze von Delitzsch proposed the introduction of an active social welfare policy. They wished to return to Vormärz goals with new instruments, trying to expand the mass base of liberalism through consistent democratization and the involvement of hitherto ignored social strata, thus fostering true equality. They had realized that German liberalism would not regain its former position unless it added the workers to its mass base. But few in the liberal camp grasped the need for democratic progress and a new labor policy: even fewer had the courage to accept it with all its consequences. As the majority refused to cooperate, the workers could not be won over to the cause of liberalism. By delaying the expansion of political rights, however, the liberals also constrained their own room to maneuver. All this contributed to their submission to Bismarck.

IV. The last chance to create German unity in a democratic way vanished with the rejection of the policy of seeking an alliance with the workers. German liberalism entered a vacuum. It was reduced to clutching at the victories of Bismarck (Schleswig-Holstein, Königgrätz), like a drowning man reaching for a lifeboat. Even today, opinions differ widely about the evaluation of 1866–71. Some consider it to be the submission of the German middle classes— liberal capitulation to the militarist power of the Prussian authoritarian state—while others hail it as the triumph of the public mind over futile doctrinairism and narrow-minded particular interests. All disputants agree, however, that the social basis of 1871 was built on the class alliance of the Junkers and the capitalist bourgeoisie, and propelled by the coincidence of their interests to join forces against the working classes. The compromise reconciled the differences between the material interests of the upper middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie on the one hand, and, more importantly, the free trade interests of the bourgeoisie and the Eastern Elban large landowners on the other. This was what fed the “realpolitische Optimismus” of post-revolutionary liberalism

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which renounced political self-realization and turned to a dogmatic interpretation of a predetermined national economy for clues on how to create a self-justifying theory. In order for the symbiosis of classes to work, it was necessary to renew the conservative side, which came to realize that, although it was unable to govern civil society alone, even after the inevitable sharing of power, it would have enough influence to persuade the state to restrain industrial capitalism. This solution fitted in with the main trend governing the social groups concerned, which were still searching for their identity and laying claim to an ever greater say in molding their social and economic conditions, even at the cost of some of their political ambitions. Bismarck’s victory over Austria swept away the main obstacle to lesser German unity. The event caused a landslide in the liberal camp, as a result of which those seeking a compromise at any cost now represented the majority. The Borussian (Prussian) interpretation of the North German Confederation identified it as the unquestionable Prussian hegemony over the other German states instead of as a confederation of the member states based upon equal partnership. In this narrative it was seen as a historic step towards unification and a partial nation-state and hailed as a victory of the “true German spirit”—which had also manifested itself in 1517 and 1813—over “false” consciousness. Droysen considered it to be a major stride “in the right direction.” In Baumgarten’s view (see his Der deutsche Liberalismus. Eine Selbstkritik), moreover, the retention of an attitude of opposition following positive changes would threaten liberalism with becoming irrelevant. It was vitally important to liberalism, he opined, that it become capable of governing as soon as possible. “Those who regard it as the betrayal of liberal greatness that liberalism, instead of demanding unlimited possibilities in opposition, would like to achieve a little in government, cannot be helped,” he concluded. With Bismarck, classic diplomacy capable of unleashing national passions triumphed. Exploiting the successes of the policy of national unity, it stabilized the monarchical-authoritarian order, and created new political foundations by relying on the transitory balance of powers between the nobility and the bourgeoisie. In Lothar Gall’s opinion, the distinctive ambivalence of 1864–1866– 1871 was, on the one hand, derived from the framework it created within domestic politics for the deep socio-economic structural changes in the name of the traditional monarchic principle; on the other hand, in foreign policy, with constant reference to the balance of power, it effected a major reshuffle in nineteenth-century Europe. Bismarck recognized that the only way to save Germany from breaking up into its constituent units was to maintain the new equilibrium. Accordingly, he saw that there was no choice but to preserve the status quo, both internally and

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externally. However, this eventually proved untenable, destroyed by the radical socio-economic changes of the 1890s. An anonymous columnist wrote the following prescient analysis in the Hungarian newspaper Pesti Napló in assessment of Bismarck’s policy. Anyone who renounces his free will and manly right of self-determination will, in time, become so accustomed to leading strings that [eventually] he will not be able to take a single step without them. Such self-mutilation was committed by Germany, jubilantly and in the conviction that it was thereby demonstrating the finest exercise of manly power. This is where the greatest danger for the future lies. A policy which sheds German blood purely for purposes of conquest, the conscience of the German nation remaining in complete ignorance, will proceed with its saturnalias, willy nilly, and there will be no people to roar: ‘No more!’ There will be a German emperor, but there will be no German nation. The significant majority of German liberals, however, welcomed it as a success, notwithstanding the fact that this acknowledgment was in effect the very submission rejected only a few years earlier, in 1862. Paradoxically, therefore, the triumph of authoritarian constitutionalism over self-restricting liberalism was won with the active support of the latter. In the apology of the national liberals, the empire was presented as a modern unified state, although in reality the work was incomplete. Outwardly, the exclusion of Austria was a major omission, while the stability of the state was called into question by the discontent of annexed areas populated by different nationalities. Inwardly, there was a total lack of national unity. In 1871 social and economic transformation did not keep pace with the democratization of politics and society. The whole project got stuck in the phase of founding an empire, leaving much of the task of creating national unity for the next decade. The German national liberals’ analysis of the situation—which was not devoid of self-deception—took as its point of departure the idea that the liberalization of Prussia would ensue as a direct result of unification. They argued that the efforts they had made for the national cause was what had driven the Hohenzollerns to take on the military burdens of forging a nation, with all its unpopular consequences, while the material conditions for the demolition of Prussian militarism would soon emerge. They presumed that at the peak of its glory, emerging from victorious wars, military absolutism would begin to democratize itself. They entertained the illusion that the basic principles of liberalism could be temporarily suspended and that their sacrifice would be rewarded by the voluntary self-abolition of the militarist dictatorship.

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Their position was gravely mistaken, and not only in theory. By recognizing and actively supporting the power structure in its partial adjustment to the need to modernize society as a whole, and by buttressing its misleading manipulations ideologically, they contributed to the stabilization of an antidemocratic system incapable of further development. Leading themselves and society into an impasse, they made it doubly hard for those looking for genuine ways out.

V. The great majority of liberals experienced 1871 as a moment of culmination. They envisaged a great opportunity of drawing up an imperial constitution. It is true that, at the beginning of the 1870s, liberalism genuinely seemed to have gained some ground. As a result of the new empire, the pace of economic growth picked up considerably, and the apparently decreasing social tensions and national liberal initiatives for comprehensive reforms held out the hope of improvement in the near future. But this relative calm of the so-called liberal era was short-lived. The universal suffrage introduced by Bismarck challenged both the left- and right-wing opponents of liberalism and paved the way for the crumbling of the liberal bourgeoisie between the absolute state and the ‘absolute society.’ After that, the depression which started in 1873 revealed how ill-founded the “forced optimism” had been, which prophesied the liberal improvement in the compromise with Bismarck. This marked the beginning of the consolidation of the absolute state and the isolation of the liberals. There was hardly any time to enjoy the ‘fruits of victory’ before it dawned on the liberals that what they had gained by capitulating was under threat and that they had to cope with the challenges of increasingly powerful rival parties. It was in part because of their fear of these rivals that they acknowledged the parliamentary system—in its essential elements—to be established, and that it was in their interest not to seek its further development but, if need be, its de-liberalization for the sake of preserving the status quo. The upsetting of the truce that had been agreed on concerning constitutional control over the military spending also directed their attention to the crumbling of the equilibrium created in 1871. Rejecting military absolutism and advocating a true constitutional state, the national liberals demanded parliamentary control over the army’s budget and annual renewal of parliamentary appropriation. However, they did not have sufficient strength to reassert the principles suspended in 1866, and, retreating from their hesitant attempt, they had to resign themselves to the

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‘Septennat’ (determination of the army’s expenses for a seven-year period). The crisis of 1873 brought to the surface conflicts that had been suppressed during the enthusiasm of 1871, and liberal reform politics ended before they had started to bloom. National liberalism’s room for maneuver was further narrowed by a revived conservatism on the one side and a rising socialist left on the other. The program, which combined a central economic policy of high protective tariffs with repressive domestic policy measures, took final shape by 1878–79, which showed a strengthening of industrial capital to the detriment of the Junkers, and contained a new element, an active and powerful international policy. The change made the workers’ movement illegal, which proved to be a school of ‘revolutionary education,’ speeding up the emergence of a new consciousness. The polemics highlighting the elaboration of the ‘new orientation’ attacked two pillars of the liberal worldview: the principles of laissezfaire and of the constitutional state. This meant the final, irreversible distortion of the core of national liberalism which had lost its sense of orientation when it compromised itself for the sake of preserving its position. In 1870–78 the of national unity slogan became the ideological weapon of the liberals, who felt that it was being jeopardized from within. The antifeudal character of their program, which promoted capitalist modernization, was weakened and the antisocialist tendency strengthened. Formally, their nationalism preserved several elements of their original reform ideas, but their fear of marginalization pushed them to accept a number of illiberal measures. In 1871 the relationship between liberalism and socialism also changed. Earlier, the trends which made up the German national movements had clearly separated. Within German liberalism there were great differences in the evaluation of the problem, although Benningen’s extreme hostility to the workers was typical of only a few of them. The peculiar arguments of the majority who rejected cooperation were summarized by Treitschke in his pamphlet Der Sozialismus und seine Gönner (Socialism and its patrons), published in 1874, which also urged particular social reforms, including the elaboration of factory laws, improvement of basic supplies, and relieving the misery of workers’ quarters. The turnaround of 1878–79 was also promoted by a modification of Bismarck’s policy. The Chancellor felt that the time was now right to end his alliance with the liberals, which he had been compelled to conclude earlier on in order to boost conservative influence. Underlying the formation of the alternative majority based on a coalition of the conservatives and the right-wing national liberals—who agreed to give up more of their principles—were the economic changes discussed above. Under the influence of the sudden halt in economic growth and the

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fear of social conflict, many blamed the liberals for the crisis, which reinforced the position of the protectionists. Metal and textile industrialists with an interest in the introduction of protective tariffs, as well as Prussian landowners, launched an offensive against industrial and commercial freedom. The influence of conservative nationalism increased on the basis of anti-liberal, anti-internationalist, and anti-Semitic views, condemning liberalism as antinational and the harbinger of the Jews. In May–June 1878 an offensive in support of conservative absolutism was begun from several directions against the toleration of liberal elements. The consummation of this action also terminated the transformation of German nationalism’s character. The approval of the exceptional law rudely violating the liberal notion of a constitutional state marked their final capitulation to Bismarck. The fear of socialist revolution became an integral part of right-wing nationalism. The voting on 12 July 1879 on the customs issue demonstrated both the collapse of national liberalism and its fundamental impotence, and laid the groundwork for the alliance of conservatives and right-wing national liberals of 1887. Thus, at the end of the 1870s, the joint crisis of the economy and the parliamentary system led to a shift to the right, which was sanctioned by the national liberals themselves. A significant force behind this change was the industrial proletariat, whose strongly class-militant behavior was due mainly to the fact that, unlike British liberals, German liberals were incapable of integrating the workers into their movement. The majority of German liberals failed to realize in time the role that trade unions could have played in involving the workers in the liberal economic and constitutional system, and their cooperation with the police state led to an aggravation of social conflict. All this meant that, by the end of the century, German nationalism had given up its future-orientated concept of a nation built on the free cooperation of legally equal citizens, becoming instead a reservoir of anti-liberal, antisocialist, and anti-Semitic trends, as well as an increasingly aggressive foreign policy. At the same time, conservative, paternalistic, antidemocratic elements, especially the paternalist ethos of an autocratic state, became the formative factors forging a new Wilhelminian German national identity. These were the dark consequences of ‘founding the empire inwardly,’ and it had long-term effects. The anti-liberal turn of 1878–79 was tantamount to a complete failure of German liberalism, which had played a part in building the empire. What motivated its representatives to accept it was their desire to avoid a break with Bismarck at all costs. Although they had lost their monopolistic position in Parliament, they sought at least a walk-on part in imperial politics. The turn further weakened the national liberals. The majority still regarded the policy of self-restriction as the only

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option. The ideology of clinging to the last shreds of power was formulated by Benningsen, who claimed that pragmatism was the only way to bring national liberalism out of the crisis. An exponent of new apologetic propaganda, Jolly declared that the introduction of the parliamentary system of government was impossible in Germany, that the parties were ill-suited for government, and that a powerful army and bureaucracy were indispensable prerequisites for national life. Although many experienced the turn as the frustration of their hopes, and bitterly criticized Bismarck, the general view was represented by Rudolf Hayen (1881): “for want of something better, all we can do is to reckon with this man, whatever he may be like.” In the history of German liberalism, 1878–79 marks the caesura that irreversibly and definitively closed off previous developments. Wrapped in delusions, they thought they had merely postponed the creation of the liberal system of government to a more favorable time. But 1873–79 proved that the hopes of 1871 had been built on sand, driving the liberals into a tight corner once again. Acting in the spirit manifest from 1850, with brief interruptions, their majority chose total and unconditional surrender to the conservative, authoritarian system, giving up all their basic principles. The year 1878–79 marks the lowest point of German liberalism, as it sought to contribute to the foundation of the empire. It marks their bad decision cynically to accept capitulation—so depriving liberalism of its roots—regarding a meager share of power as an end in itself and placing it before all else. By denying its past and giving up its positive view of the future, it reduced liberalism to a toy of everyday political intrigue. Having surrendered its positive legacy, it became unreasonable to try to revive the past. German liberalism could only regain its validity after a fresh start upon newly laid foundations. Only a qualitative turn could provide it with the political competence it had once possessed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baumgarten, Herrmann. 1974. Der deutsche Liberalismus. Eine Selbskritik, ed. Adolf M. Birke. Frankfurt am Main–Berlin–Wien: Ullstein Bücher. Bibó, István. 1986. ‘A német politikai hisztéria okai és története’ [The causes and history of German political hysteria], in Válogatott tanulmányok [Selected Studies]. Budapest: Magvetô Kiadó. German translation: Die Deutsche Hysterie. Ursachen und Geschichte. (tr. by Hans-Henning Paetzke). 1990. Frankfurt am Main–Leipzig: Insel Verlag, Italian abridged version: Isteria tedesca, paura francese, insicurezza italiana. Psicologia di tre nazioni da Napoleone a Hitler. (tr. by Melinda Mihályi). 1997. Bologna: Il Mulino.

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Diószegi, István. 1967. Klasszikus diplomácia—modern hatalmi politika [Classical diplomacy—Modern power politics]. Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó. Fesser, Gerd. 1975. ‘Fortschrittspartei und Arbeiterbewegung in der Zeit des preussischen Heeres- und Verfassungskonflikts,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 7. Gall, Lothar, ed. 1976. Liberalismus. Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch. ———. 1982. ‘Bismarcks Preussen, das Reich und Europa,’ Historische Zeitschrift 234 (2). ———. 1984. Europa auf dem Wege in die Moderne 1850–90. Munich: Oldenbourg. Gergely, András. 2001. 1848-ban hogy is volt? Tanulmányok Magyarország és Közép-Európa 1848-49-es történetébôl [How did it happen in 1848? Essays on the 1848–49 History of Hungary and Central Europe]. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó. Gugel, Michael. 1975. Industrieller Aufstieg und bürgerliche Herrschaft. Sozioökonomische Interessen und politische Ziele des liberalen Bürgertums in Preussen zur Zeit des Verfassungskonflikts 1857–67. Cologne: Paul-Rugenstein. Hardtwig, Wolfgang. 1980. ‘Von Preussens Aufgabe in Deutschland zu Deutschlands Aufgabe in der Welt’. Historische Zeitschrift 231 (2). Haupts, Leo. 1978. ‘Die liberale Regierung in Preussen in der Zeit der “Neuen Ära.” Zur Geschichte des preussischen Konstitutionalismus,’ Historische Zeitschrift 227 (1). Huber, Ernst Rudolf. 1957–63. Vol. 1, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol.1, Reform und Restauration 1789 bis 1830 (1957); Vol.2, Der Kampf um Einheit und Freiheit 1830 bis 1850 (1960); Vol. 3, Bismarck und das Reich (1963); Vol. 4, Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (1969). Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Langewiesche, Dieter. 1988a. Liberalismus in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, ed. 1988b. Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen. Machtan, Lothar, and Milles Dietrich. 1980. Die Klassensymbiose von Junkertum und Bourgeoisie. Zum Verhältnis von gesellschaftlicher und politischer Herrschaft in Preussen-Deutschland 1850–1878–79. Frankfurt am Main– Berlin–Vienna: Ullstein. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1978. ‘Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen “Klassenloser Bürgergesellschaft” und “Organisiertem Kapitalismus.” Zu einigen neuerern Liberalismusinterpretationene,’ in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1. Nipperdey, Thomas. 1983. Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat. Munich: C. H. Beck. Offermann, Toni. 1983. ‘Preussischer Liberalismus zwischen Revolution und Reichsgründung im regionalen Vergleich. Berliner und Kölner Fortschrittsliberalismus in der Konfliktszeit,’ in Langewiesche (1983). Ritter, Gerhard A. 1980. ‘Staat und Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland von der Revolution 1848/49 bis zur nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung,’ Historische Zeitschrift 231 (2). Ruggiero, Guido de. 1930. Geschichte des Liberalismus in Europa. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Schmidt, Gustav. 1980. ‘Politischer Liberalismus, “Landed Interests” und Organisierte Arbeiterschaft, 1850–1880,’ in Gall (1980).

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Schmidt, Siegfried. 1875. ‘Liberale Parteibewegung und Volksmassen während der bürgerlischen Umwälzung in Deutschland 1789–1871,’ in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 5. Sheehan, James J. 1993. German History, 1770–1866. Oxford (1991,1989): Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Humanity Books. (Chicago, 1978). Winkler, Heinrich A. 1978. ‘Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus. Der deutsche Liberalismus in der Krise von 1878–79,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1.

Switzerland: a European Model of Liberal Nationalism? ALBERT TANNER

I. “The creation of a Swiss nation on the basis of democracy and federation” was, to Hans Kohn, “the only lasting achievement of the stormy European year of 1848.” Despite different languages and cultures, “a democratic nationalism similar to the one known in England and the United States” had developed in Switzerland, “a nationalism made secure and strong by its insistence on individual freedom and respect for diversity” (Kohn, 1956, pp. 8, 77). Indeed, similar to the United States, in Switzerland the “Construction of the Nation,”1 and the “Invention of the People”2—in other words, the general acceptance of the political idea of a people no longer divided into different estates, but one in which all political sovereignty originates—were two intimately related processes. This continues to be one of the characteristics of Swiss nationalism to the present day. More than in most other European countries, in Switzerland, the elevation—and even sanctification—of the Nation as the only source of meaning and justification (Alter, 1985, p. 15), which increasingly, if with varying emphasis, characterized nationalism after the middle of the nineteenth century, was accompanied by a similar elevation of the people to a body of united citizens. The introduction of direct forms of democracy from the 1860s onwards, initially at the canton level, but, after the Federal Constitution of 1874, also at the national level, further enhanced this hypostatization of the people. Ernest Renan, in his speech at the Sorbonne in 1882, was the first to underscore the fictional character of the nation and to proclaim the plébiscite de tous les jours as the only legitimation of a nation. To him, Switzerland represented “the most legitimately composed nation of Europe,” precisely because neither religion, nor language, nor “race,” nor any “natural boundaries” were holding it together. It was a kind of ideal type of nation, primarily based on the shared experience of history, as well as the desire and the will to continue living together, cherishing

1 2

On the constructivist approach, cf. Anderson, 1983. Cf. E. S. Morgan, 1988.

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its common heritage (Renan, 1934, p. 10).3 Renan’s assessment, partly a response to German cultural and linguistic nationalism, largely corresponded to the then prevalent question in Switzerland of what constituted a nation, even though at the time there was a shift of emphasis from shared will to shared history (Hunziker, 1970, pp. 4–6, 12–13). Unlike so-called “integral nationalism,” 4 in which the correspondence of language, ethnicity and state was considered the only legitimation of a nation, political discourse in Switzerland turned the coexistence of various languages and cultures into a new core element of national identity. However, the ideal of peaceful coexistence of different languages and cultures not only served as a new justification for the existence of Switzerland as a nation-state, it soon became an important element of a Swiss sense of mission in Europe, too. The following outline of the rise of a national consciousness and of a nationalist movement, the development of nationalism in Switzerland from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, is partly indebted to Miroslav Hroch’s model (Hroch, 1985), which distinguishes between three stages. At stage A, national issues arouse enthusiasm among scholars and intellectuals interested in linguistic and/or historical tradition. At stage C, nationalism has turned into a mass movement. At the intermediary stage B, an active minority initiates purposeful national agitation. In Switzerland, the first stage can be located at around the middle of the eighteenth century, while the third stage was largely completed with the foundation of the Federal state in 1848, the nationalist movement having achieved its most important objective. What followed after that can, by extending Hroch’s model, be considered the stage of the nationalization of state and society. By means of a frequently statesponsored campaign, national-minded or nationalist forces attempted further to promote the national integration of society, to encourage the formation of a collective national identity, and to strengthen the individual’s emotional ties to the state and nation. At a fourth stage, nationalism in Switzerland soon became the dominant ideology of integration and legitimation of the existing state and social order. The political

3

On the concept of the nation as one great community based on solidarity, cf. François and Schulze, 1998, pp. 17–32. 4 On the differentiation between ‘Risorgimento nationalism,’ whose primary aim was political autonomy, and ‘integral or aggressive nationalism,’ in which one’s own nation became absolute and characterized by rigid inclusion and exclusion, cf. Alter, 1985, pp. 29–56. On the evolution of German nationalism, which had a lasting influence on Swiss discourse, from a primarily liberal ideology of opposition and emancipation, to an aggressive, anti-liberal and antidemocratic imperial nationalism marked by an excessive glorification of the national power state, cf. Wehler, 1995, pp. 938–61.

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concept of nationhood based upon democratic principles was losing ground. The ruling bourgeois parties increasingly referred to national characteristics to distance themselves not only from outsiders, but also from elements within Switzerland as well. But although, for a long time, particular political forces and social groups were only partially integrated into the new state—women not until 1971—the history of Switzerland since 1848 can be understood as the history of a successful national integration of various languages and cultures. After a period of fifty years of deep inner strife and recurring interventions by the Great Powers, the liberal and radical founders of the Confederation of 1848 created a liberal constitutional state whose institutional foundations have not undergone any significant changes since its expansion in 1874. Even the new constitution of 1999 has hardly changed anything. The constitution of 1848, and even more so that of 1874, was a widely accepted consensus offering the basis for national integration qua state citizenship. They constituted Switzerland as a nation-state—much like the French Republic earlier on—which defines itself through common citizenship. To Jürgen Habermas, as to other supporters of ‘liberal constitutionalism,’ Switzerland, like the U. S., embodies the future-oriented type of state in which political culture or national identity is not based upon ethnic, linguistic, or cultural origins shared by all citizens alike. Therefore, the core of citizenship is constituted neither by a common language nor by the myth of blood-relationship, but by political participation, legal and political equality, and by citizens having the same rights and duties (Habermas, 1994, p. 17).5 However, even in Switzerland it was not merely the concept of the nation-state, or of liberal nationalism and of constitutional patriotism, that legitimized the process of nation-building from 1798 to 1848, and that informed national identity in the subsequent 150 years. The sources for the identification of the Swiss—male and female—with their state and its territory, for their loyalty, attachment, and commitment to state and nation, have always been emotional as well as historical and cultural. In Switzerland, as in other nation-states or so-called nations of political will (Willensnationen), common cultural and national characteristics have repeatedly been constructed, increasingly so since the 1880s, using political and cultural rituals to sacralize the nation, emotionally embedding it and declaring it to be a great community of solidarity. In the course of the twentieth century, especially in the inter-war period, but also during the past three decades, the political Right has made increasingly frequent use of ethnic or even racist concepts to dis-

5

For the discussion about liberal and ethnic nationalism, cf. Couture et al., 1996.

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tance itself from the outside, and to exclude ‘foreign elements’ from within. This has had a long-term impact on political culture and national identity. Present-day Switzerland is still miles away from granting the foreign population equal legal and political rights, and citizenship is granted with great reluctance, not least because the constitution of national identity in twentieth-century Switzerland has been closely linked to exclusionary tendencies directed against ‘abroad,’ against anything and anyone foreign and alien.6 Despite these serious reservations, however, I nevertheless feel Switzerland to be an example which shows that multi-national states, particularly when they are thoroughly decentralized, can generate less conflict and insecurity than nation-states giving expression to an ethnic principle of nationality.

II. In Switzerland, a kind of ‘national’ consciousness, in the sense of a collective identity encompassing both the various cantons, or Orte, of the Old Confederation and the confessional boundaries, only began to form during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.7 Initially, this consciousness was largely restricted to the enlightened aristocratic and bourgeois élites. Its most important point of crystallization was the Helvetic Society, founded in 1761 (Kohn, 1956, pp. 18–34).8 Among its members, who met once a year to celebrate the experience of national unity, were the actual inventors and constructors of a Swiss national consciousness in the sense of asserting a shared fatherland. In their endeavor to promote the general ‘good fortune’ of Switzerland through their literary and social activities, these enlightened patriots revived the history of the Old Confederation as a heroic past, portraying the “Old Confederates” as ideals of natural moral simplicity and republican virtue. Inspired by the new enthusiasm for nature, they glorified the Alps, and the Swiss scenery and landscape, celebrating them as an expression of the natural freedom and virtue of their Swiss fatherland. Thus, in a retrospective transfiguration they turned the alpine ‘Old Confederate’ into the ideal future Swiss man (Marchal, 1992, pp. 37–49; Frei, 1964, pp. 11–13). The aim of the “imagological tinkerings” (Marchal) of these enlightened patriots was not so much directly political as moral. They con6

For such exclusionary tendencies in foreign involvement, trade and immigration, and the difficult nexus between identity and exclusion in the twentieth century, cf. Sciarini et al., 1998. 7 However, since the late fifteenth century, a supraregional consciousness of community and tradition can be identified among the political élites; cf. Marchal, 1990; Sablonier and Weishaupt, 1991. 8 Im Hof and Capitani.

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ceived of the nation as a community of free and equal-born individuals, as a community which was no longer governed by tradition and a social order based upon estates, but by the principles of morality and reason, virtue and conviction. One was not a patriot owing to one’s origin or birth, but owing to one’s virtue and cultural convictions. Despite the emphasis on the uniqueness of their own fatherland, their patriotism was a universal virtue, also applicable to other fatherlands.9 The term ‘nation’, therefore, rarely occurs in isolation, but usually in compounds such as national virtue, national character, and national education. These enlightened patriots were not thinking of or hoping for national unification; the nation as such was to them not yet a tangible political idea. The fact that the enlightened patriots were seeking to find their shared national ground, not primarily in language, culture, or ‘race,’10 but in the recollection of the days when the Confederation, was created, and in the exceptional qualities of the scenery and landscape, was to have far-reaching consequences for the development of a Swiss national consciousness: for the first time, history and the Alps became the most important building blocks of a Swiss national identity. However, the mythologization of the free shepherd as the true man, the idyllization of pastoral life, and the transfiguration of Switzerland into the ‘Promised Land of Freedom’ was not a purely Swiss construct, but mainly the result of what amounted to a craze for the Alps and anything Swiss among the European aristocracy and educated bourgeoisie, aroused not least by Albrecht von Haller’s poem ‘Die Alpen,’ and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Héloïse. After 1760, the image of the free and natural peasant of the Alps, and of Switzerland as the land of shepherds, was propagated in countless reports by foreign travelers and eventually became part of the national self-image. As a result of the Helvetic revolutions and the introduction of the “one and indivisible” Helvetic Republic on 12 April 1798,11 it took only a few months to put into political reality what the enlightened patriots had not even dared to contemplate. Lacking a concerted nationalist movement, the Old Confederation collapsed under the pressure of regional revolts when the French troops invaded. The loose federation was transformed into a centralized state based upon the principles of 9

On patriotism as a moral construct of collective identity, cf. Giesen, 1993, pp. 122–29. 10 Influenced by their idea of profound physiological and climatic influences on man, some scientists considered the so-called Alpine herdsman to be of the genus Homo alpinus, as described by Hippocrates; cf. Marchal, 1992, pp. 42–44. 11 Cf. Böning, 1998; Simon, 1991, pp. 29–49.

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representative democracy. The confederate cantons lost their sovereignty and all state power rested in the Republic. Except for the Jews,12 all inhabitants became equal citizens. Under French influence, the terms ‘Nation,’ ‘People,’ and ‘State’ became more closely associated in political discourse. The Helvetic Republic saw itself as a state-nation.13 In order to secure the urgently needed political loyalty of their citizens, the Helvetic authorities declared the constitution to be the “true fatherland,” defining patriotism as “love for the holiest rights of mankind.” Relying upon political participation and the newly guaranteed fundamental rights, it was especially the party of the so-called Republicans, consisting of some ‘enlightened’ members of the old ruling families, as well as of men from the provincial propertied, economic, and educated middle classes, who hoped to develop a constitutional patriotism in the sense of liberal nationalism. By way of allegorical visual representations and state symbols, national festivities and ceremonies such as the citizen’s oath, political propaganda in the press, and activities in schools and the army, the Helvetic authorities systematically endeavored to promote identification with the new state among the wider population.14 Unlike the enlightened patriots, however, the supporters of the Helvetic Republic did not shy away from exclusion. The former ‘lords,’ the ‘aristocrats,’ were stigmatized as “tyrants,” “murderers of Freedom,” or “wigs,” and excluded from the nation. They were not part of the Third Estate, which, according to Abbé Sieyès, was the sole embodiment of the nation. At the outset of the War of the Second Coalition, Austria also offered herself as a target for nationally inflamed popular anger. It was easy to establish a connection with the “Wars of Liberation”—“liberation from the Habsburgs”—and to integrate this into the national propaganda for the Helvetic Republic. Among the enemy images were federalism, local isolationism, and exclusive cantonal loyalties. In particular, it was the elitist and self-righteous liberals who saw the specter of reaction in federalism, whereas they believed that centralism would be the guarantor of freedom, and of human and civic rights (Frei, 1964, pp. 72–73; Guggenbühl, 1998a, p. 39). Both politically and morally, they strove to repress local isolationism, particularism, and the traditional mentality in general, and to root rational enlightened views of the world

12

In the Old Confederation, the Jews had only been allowed to settle in the county of Baden; after 1776 this was further restricted to the two communities of Obererendingen and Lengnau. On the issue of Jewish emancipation, cf. Mattioli, 1998, pp. 217–35. 13 Guggenbühl, 1998a, pp. 33–47. 14 For further details, cf. Frei, 1964, pp. 109–98.

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and man in the wider population, thus creating a Republic of Virtue in keeping with enlightened state philosophy.15 However, this nationalist education does not seem to have had any great effect. Most of these policies hardly made it beyond the planning stage and were unable to inspire a truly nationalist movement. The same was true of the military occupations by French or Austrian troops during the Wars of the Coalitions. Although they prompted regional resistance, no general national ‘awakening’ occurred, quite in contrast to Prussia, and despite all propaganda efforts. Embattled both from within and without, completely dependent upon France and her interests, the young Republic never really had a chance. Even the constitution remained largely theoretical. By way of the so-called Mediation Constitution of 1803, and the Federal Pact of 1815, the old order was almost completely restored. Despite this failure, however, the agitated times of the Helvetic Republic were crucial to the shaping of a national identity and to the development of a nationalist movement. First, the Helvetic Republic created a modern state apparatus on Swiss soil, thereby providing, at least for some years, a political arena that was largely uniform, both institutionally and legally—core requirements for the formation of a nation or nation-state in the modern sense. And while it is true that Switzerland again became a Federation in 1815, at the cantonal level, legal and political uniformity persisted to a great extent.16 Also, external boundaries remained unchanged after 1815, allowing the national consciousness, just as in France, to relate to a clearly defined territorial and political unit. What was even more important, however, was that, owing to the Helvetic period, the concept of a state-nation had become firmly rooted in the political experience and expectations of the progressive forces. Hence, numerous elements of the Helvetic Constitution and its concept of the state resurfaced in the Federal Constitution of 1848. At that time, moreover, popular political awareness increased enormously, almost inevitably leading to stronger identification with given political and institutional circumstances, both in their cantons and nation-wide. This was particularly true for the traditionalist resistance to the new order, which was most powerful in the central parts of Switzerland, the Valais and Ticino, as well as among large numbers of the aristocratic élite. The perceptible pressure emanating from the new state to modernize boosted not only resistance but also supra-regional cooperation. However, the new situation also forced the opposition to embrace

15 16

On the liberal Republicans, cf. Gasser, 1947, pp. 424–55, and Tanner, 1999. Cf. Guzzi-Heeb, 1998, pp. 131–47 (esp. pp. 132–36).

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national symbolism. This was to have far-reaching consequences for the shaping of a national identity in Switzerland, which would time and again draw upon antinational traditions. Like the nationalistic propaganda of the Helvetic Republic, the federalist–conservative opposition bolstered its policies with historical arguments, even though it saw the Old Confederation in a rather different light. Intent on supporting cantonal or even local solidarity, the opposition’s propaganda found itself unwittingly part of a national trend. In those times of unceasing civil war, it too claimed to be speaking in the name of all, considering itself and its objectives as genuinely Swiss. In contrast to the reformers, however, the nationalist feelings of the opposition were primarily nourished by hatred of foreign rule. Systematic propaganda attempted to inflate this hatred into a great national conflict. The imagery of political propaganda came to be so similar that it was sometimes impossible to distinguish the origins of some of the messages. This was especially true of the stereotypical ‘upright’ or ‘honest Swiss’ and of their virtues, as well as of the idealization of the ‘Freedom of Old Switzerland’ (Guzzi-Heeb, 1998, pp. 139–45; Frei, 1964, pp. 97–99). Lastly, this was the time when a reservoir of images, ideas, and stories about Switzerland was created, the contents of which were renewed and recombined by various political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since nationalist slogans and images were being used in both the pro-government and the opposition camps, something like a common denominator emerged in the political discourse, regardless of the differing political programs and ideas. According to Daniel Frei, that denominator primarily consisted of a nationalist view of history, which was at the center of ideas concerning the national character and the national future (Frei, 1964, pp. 105–106). As early as the 1830s and 1840s, during the conflict involving the Liberals and Radicals against the Conservatives regarding the reforms of the Federal Pact and national unification, these ideas and images were renewed and recombined, and used by either party to legitimize its goals. Nevertheless, this common reservoir of images and interpretations of Swiss history also meant that the losing side not only accepted the new balance of power, but was reconciled with the Federal state fairly rapidly. And, while the Conservatives did not identify with the new political order, they did so with Switzerland as their “fatherland.”17

17

Cf. Tanner, 1995, pp. 562–68; as well as, on the losing side in general, Borner, 1981.

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III. Even though, by 1803, the Helvetic experiment—and with it the concepts of the state-nation and of ‘liberal nationalism’—had failed in Switzerland and fallen into disrepute for some time, a certain national consciousness, in the sense of a supra-regional and supra-cantonal community spirit, did manage to survive. This was revealed around 1803 and in 1814–15, when such cities and regions as Geneva, the Valais, Vaud, and Ticino either wanted to remain part of the Confederation or joined up as independent cantons. This was an indication that, owing to centuries of coexistence, a fairly high degree of identification with the Swiss Confederation had developed, even in circles outside the political élites and among enlightened patriots, well before the Helvetic Republic. The republican form of government, which had distinguished the Swiss cantons from other European countries—and did so to an even greater extent during the Restoration—served as an invisible bracket. However, the national consciousness which emerged in the first three decades of the nineteenth century was highly contradictory, with very different facets, depending on political beliefs and the wider European context. There could be no question of a uniformly accepted idea of what constituted a nation. For example, it was with reference to the “Honor and Welfare of the Nation” that the Helvetic Councilors authorized the participation of Helvetic troops on the French side in the revolutionary wars. The first Landammann—or highest official—of the Mediation, Louis d’Affry, declared in 1803 that the new Constitution, imposed by Napoleon, was created to help restore the Swiss nation to the respect it had once enjoyed. And the Federal Pact of 1815, too, was declared by the restored old élites to be for the benefit of the entire fatherland. Almost at the same time, Frédéric-César Laharpe complained that the lamentable Swiss were now no longer a nation. In 1832, the year of the failed attempt to revise the Federal Pact, Mayor Hess of Zürich wrote to the Bernese Liberal Karl Schnell that one might well have to be content with the old Confederation “until the people have learned to become a Nation.”18 This ‘education’ began to intensify as early as the 1820s, along with the rise of the liberal movement in various Swiss cantons.19 Between 1815 and 1848, the incessant, often ruthless interference by the Great Powers, which posed as the guardians of Swiss neutrality and the Federal Pact of 1815, played a crucial role in the strengthening of national consciousness. This was particularly true after 1830, a time of mounting

18 19

Quoted in Andrey, 1986, p. 251. On liberalism, see Craig, 1988; Tanner, 1995, pp. 487–94.

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conservative pressure on the liberal cantons, where freedom of the press was exercised and sanctuary offered to political refugees. The strongly worded notes to the Confederation after the Free Corps expedition into Savoy organized by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72) caused even such a moderate liberal as Jeremias Gotthelf to protest against “foreign arrogance.” He called on the “Representatives of the People” not to “quake,” but to prove “manly and worthy of the Swiss people,” who would sacrifice their neutrality rather than lose their autonomy (Gotthelf, n. d., p. 51). When, in the summer of 1836, the Diet, or Tagsatzung, yielded to pressure from the Great Powers to restrict the right to political asylum, large public gatherings protested against foreign interference and for a revision of the Federal Pact. The first of these demonstrations to “save the Fatherland” took place on 7 August 1836 in Flawil, canton St. Gall, drawing between eight and ten thousand participants. To the various European governments, this mass rally became the symbol of an impending revolution (Tanner and Osterwalder, 1998, pp. 91–93). As these large rallies, which attracted some ten per cent of the male adult population, impressively demonstrated, the nationalist movement had a fairly widespread appeal as early as the mid-1830s. The expanding liberal press and the various cantonal and national associations, with their regular annual assemblies, festivities, and rituals of fraternization, made an important contribution to the shaping and propagation of a national consciousness. The development of Swiss patriotism and a national historical awareness was also promoted by such national cults as the annual celebrations commemorating decisive battles fought by the Old Confederates at Sempach or at St. Jakob near Basel. By 1836–37, there were already some 15 supra-regional or national associations; more were to follow in subsequent years (see Jost, 1998a, pp. 467–84). The Swiss Riflemen’s Association (Schweizerischer Schützenverein), founded in Aarau in 1824, played a particularly important role in the formation of the liberal and, later, radical movements. Their regular Schützenfeste, fairs featuring shooting matches, drew thousands of men from a total population of 2.3 million, and were a focal point of the liberal–radical communication network. They were a national meeting place where it was possible to socialize and forge new friendships or renew old ones, and where mutual help was promised for the political journey ahead. Declared “National Federal Holidays” and stage-managed as “National Anniversaries,” these riflemen’s, gymnasts,’ and choir singers’ fairs anticipated national unification, both symbolically and emotionally. It was mainly the liberal and radical participants who, at such events, experienced Switzerland as a living nation (Weishaupt, 1998, pp. 61–79; Hettling, 1998, pp. 19–31). But towards the end of the 1830s, even the moderate liberals and liberal–conservatives, who would accept political reform only by strictly legal means, were permeated by

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a certain Swiss national feeling, regardless of whether they were in favor of greater centralization or wanted to sustain the federal system (cf. Jaggi, 1948, pp. 161–83).

IV. In 1830–31, the liberal movement succeeded in introducing representative democracy, legal equality, guarantees of civil rights, and the protection of private property in all the cantons of the Mittelland. These liberal reforms, however, were not only the foundation of a modern state at the cantonal level; they were also a decisive boost to economic and social modernization through deregulation and a new framework for economic activities. Their new order and new rules helped the model of a bourgeois society, and a system of achievement and competition, to gain acceptance. However, they failed in their attempt to transform the Swiss Confederation into a more modern political body in 1833—not only because of the resistance by the conservative cantons, but also because the majority of the liberals themselves were still opposed to a ruthless transformation of the loose Federation. They would accept a revision of the Federal Pact of 1815 only if it was supported by all the cantons. As early as the 1830s, however, a radical minority within the liberal movement gave national unification a higher priority than strict legality. In their opinion, the sovereign people as the supreme legislator was above the law and any treaties. The people and the nation had the inalienable, natural right to seize political power. Owing to their core demand for national unification, these more radical forces came to be known as “Nationals.” In a self-confident move of dissociation from the monarchic and aristocratic forms of government, they perceived the republican-democratic order as the innermost core of Swissness (Meyerhofer, 1998, pp. 49–59). However, it was only in the 1840s that this radical liberalism grew into a more or less distinct political movement.20 It was mostly from this context that a highly agile group of patriots emerged who, as an “active minority” (Hroch) completely in thrall to the idea of a national state, attempted to inject their national enthusiasm into a wider part of the population and to create a national consciousness. “To show other countries that a Republic is not nonsense, not an impossibility,”21 in other words, to make the Republic and democracy respectable in the eyes of foreign nations—to the fervent liberals and radicals, this became Switzerland’s historical mission. As the Schweizerische Republikaner, a contemporary newspaper, noted in a dispute with

20 21

On radicalism, see Tanner, 1991a, pp. 113–38. Schweizerischer Republikaner (10 October 1845).

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conservative critics of radical liberalism in 1845, the “rightfulness of the Republic” was the political idea “which was at the core of the existence of Switzerland.” To them, the Republic was the political idea which Switzerland “carried within herself.”22 Both to the liberals and the radicals, Switzerland was a nation by dint of her own political will. In the opinion of Charles Neuhaus, one of the leading Liberals, her existence did not therefore depend upon a Federal Pact. What mattered—quite in the sense of Ernest Renan—was the consciousness, the will to be a nation (cf. Hunziker, 1970, pp. 19–22). However, it was clear to liberals and radicals alike that Switzerland as a nation would not be able to refer to ‘natural characteristics,’ as suggested by concepts of cultural nationalism. ‘Equality, freedom, equal rights, equal happiness for all citizens’: it was these republican ideals, rather than the same language, customs, and religion—or the existing state—that had to hold Switzerland together. In 1834, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, one of the leading liberal intellectuals, declared categorically that, although Germany was far ahead of Switzerland with respect to artistic and intellectual achievements, Switzerland’s republican form of government clearly lifted her above Germany: “We will ask no gracious lords how far we may go in human rights, in freedom and religion.”23 And it was republican freedom, the liberal Republic alone that, in the radical view, could replace the loss of one’s ethnic and linguistic community. Because all Swiss men, regardless of their different languages, enjoyed republican liberties, they felt no desire to unite with their ‘country of national origin,’ that is to say, their linguistic or cultural nationalities. Nationalism, here seen as an “elevation of the nation to the only source of meaning and justification” (Alter), thus bracketed the liberal–radical movement. The radicals drew the legitimation for their revolutionary politics from the principle of the sovereignty of the people and the nation, whose will was always lawful, as Abbé Sieyès had proclaimed as early as 1789, for the nation was the law itself. How intimately people and nation were connected in the liberal–radical view appears in the work of Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. In his opinion, the legitimation of national unification and radical politics was rooted in the “sacredness of the nation,” for it is the nation which embodies the people “in its natural, prototypical and archetypal condition.”24 Others, influenced by Romanticism, saw the nation rather as a legacy of the rational spirit of the people. Virtually equated with the sovereign peo-

22

Schweizerischer Republikaner (10 October 1845). Der Eidgenosse (18 August 1834), quoted by Hunziker, 1970, p. 23. 24 Quoted by Gruner, 1977, p. 77. 23

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ple, the nation had the inalienable right to assume political power. Similar to the French Revolution and other national liberation movements of the first half of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the nation in Switzerland was also a “discourse of liberation.” To the radicals, national unification was a political necessity grounded both in nature and rationality. However, national unification was also based upon historical grounds. Both the liberals and the radicals embraced the idea of an historical ‘nationality’ rooted either in an original, natural state, or in the high, or late, Middle Ages. According to this view, neither the unification of the nation nor democracy needed to be created anew in a fight against the reactionary powers of the aristocracy and the church; they merely had to be reconstructed. Many of them, particularly the liberals, therefore saw and presented themselves less as innovators striving for something that had never existed, than as renewers (Tanner, 1991b, pp. 51–74). Rather than interpreting the political program of liberalism and of national unification as a revolution, they saw it as a restoration of earlier, and, in their opinion, fairer conditions. This traditionalist interpretation of liberal demands and goals such as national unification was congenial to the attitudes and mentality of the rural–agricultural population, and may have contributed in no small measure to the fact that liberalism and radicalism found such staunch support among them in the 1830s and 1840s. In their attempts to legitimize national unification, both the liberals and the radicals, like the Helvetic propagandists before them, referred again and again to the “Founding Age” of the Old Confederation, and to the “Heroic Age” of the Late Middle Ages. Like their conservative opponents, they drew on the historic images that had been ‘invented’ by the educated élites of the enlightened patriots. For example, at riflemen’s and choir singers’ festivals, both liberal and radical speakers conjured up their forefathers’ fight for freedom, their readiness to make sacrifices, and their love of their brothers-in-arms. The new political movements and their fight for national unification were thus linked to the late medieval “wars of liberation,” in a kind of mythical synchronization of past and present, and an association of current actions with the timeless, heroic struggle (cf. Weishaupt, 1998, p. 68). However, the political discourse of the liberal and radical intellectuals not only referred to the late medieval wars of liberation, it also made frequent reference to the rural and urban uprisings under the ancien régime. The widely read “teacher of the people,” Heinrich Zschokke, had a great influence on the historical views of liberal and radical politicians, as well as of the wider public. His purpose in invoking a tradition of resistance, similar to the glorification of the Old Confederates, was at least fourfold: first, it was an attempt to discredit the ancien régime and

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any restorative tendencies, while at the sametime legitimizing the Helvetic Revolution of 1798, the liberal revolutions of 1830–31, and their struggle for national unification; second, any reference to similar past revolts served the construction of a shared past, with greater or lesser emphasis on the people, especially former subjects, as the agent and motor of history; third, the people, or the Swiss nation, had to be posited as the crucial political source of continuity, because, unlike in France or England, it could not be the fragmented state of the Old Confederation; fourth, the freedom-loving, heroic Confederates of the late Middle Ages and the rebellious forces of the ancien régime could thus be linked to the new nationalist ideology. Although this liberal–radical understanding of the past was of an ideological character, it was no “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm/Ranger), but a new “interpretation of tradition” (Würgler) which, albeit related to the present, was not arbitrary. It used the late medieval “wars of liberation,” like the mostly abortive uprisings of the eighteenth century, to legitimize new political demands and liberalist and nationalist reforms. Tradition thus served to legitimize national revolution (cf. Würgler, 1998, pp. 79–90, esp. pp. 86–87). However, this natural or historical nationality always remained a highly charged political issue, both to the liberals and to the radicals; it never stood on its own two feet. Despite all the attempts at historical legitimation, the nation constructed in the course of liberal–radical debates on the “democratic national code” remained first and foremost a nation of political will. The Radicals understood nation as a “movement of political will and political participation” (Giesen, 1993, pp. 194–95).

V. Both liberal and radical nationalists aimed primarily at mobilizing the general population for the reform of the Federal Pact of 1814–15, as well as for national unification, in order to overcome the prevailing particularism and federalism, to establish the people’s sovereignty throughout the Confederation, and to achieve a nation-state resolution of the Federal question. But in order to strengthen the feeling of national unification across regional and social boundaries, and especially to break the resistance of the old élites and the churches, it was not enough to promise progress through liberalism and radicalism, or to make ritual appeals to the unification of people and nation. It was only the advent of anti-Jesuitism, the conjuring-up of a danger emanating from the Jesuits and the papism of the Catholic Church against national autonomy and the democratization of Switzerland, that enabled the radicals to anchor national feeling and consciousness so strongly in the wider middle-class population for the appeal to the nation to become an important instrument of political solidarity and activism towards a common goal, espe-

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cially in Protestant Switzerland. Only in this way would radicalism ultimately be able not only to challenge the staunch conservatives but also to stir the moderate liberal forces into action. The radicals’ anti-ecclesiastical, anticlerical, and ultimately anti-Jesuit impetus can be understood only in the light of the secularization already undertaken by liberalism. Radicalism even more than liberalism denied the previously supreme powers of interpretation and legitimation exercised by church and religion over the social and political order, declaring faith to be a predominantly private affair. This secularization was intimately connected to a new relationship between church and state. While these endeavors did provoke a certain degree of resistance among reformed circles, opposition was strongest in Catholic areas, where liberal and radical Catholics called most vehemently for state control of the church (Lang, 1998, pp. 259–70). What emerged was a political Catholicism acting as a bulwark—even for some Protestants—against the ‘Zeitgeist,’ against social and political change which needed to be restrained at all costs. The Pope and the Catholic Church in their turn saw religion and their position in society endangered by liberal principles and demands—democracy, sovereignty of the people, freedom of thought and the press, abolition of special privileges, state schools—as well as by the overall secular ideology of the liberal state. The Baden Articles of 1834 played a crucial role in the politicization of Catholicism. Various Catholic or bi-confessional cantons conceived them as an attempt to define church–state relations in the liberal sense. The abolition of the monasteries in the canton of Aargau, pushed through the Aargau Parliament in 1841 by the Catholic radical, Augustin Keller, further increased political tensions. Most of all, though, the dispute over monastic foundations exacerbated the denominational and religious aspects of the political conflicts. A near-unbridgeable chasm yawned between liberal and radical ideas regarding the proper order of state and society, and those of the conservatives, who were closely guided by religion. It became increasingly evident that liberal democracy and national unification were irreconcilable with papism and an authoritarian theocracy. Moreover, the invitation of the Jesuits to Lucerne in the autumn of 1844, as a reaction to the abolition of monasteries, supplied the radicals with a weapon whose symbolic power they readily recognized and put to use. Following the restoration of the Society of Jesus by the Pope in 1814, the Jesuits had resumed their educational and missionary activities, and not only in Switzerland. Against a background of Restoration Catholicism, they perceived themselves as a fighting force against the liberal ideologies concerning state and society, thereby supplying their opponents with an enemy image which was easily turned into a symbol of everything that radicalism opposed.

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Hence, the Jesuits partly functioned as a substitute for previous specters such as foreign enemies and tyrannical monarchs. They embodied the uncanny power of the Catholic Church and allied reactionary forces, who opposed rationality, progress, and democracy, the “enlightenment of the popular classes,” and their “intellectual and moral elevation” (Druey). They stood for those who mistrusted the social and political maturity of the individual as much as the sovereignty of the people, who, as antinational forces, set religion and tradition above the nation, thereby—according to liberals and radicals—threatening the national autonomy of Switzerland, and opposing national unification with all their might. Whoever defended them gave himself away as a reactionary and an enemy of his Fatherland. This shows how much radical nationalism required the citizens to close ranks, both outwardly against papist Catholicism and the Great Powers’ interventionism, as well as inwardly to overcome cantonal particularism and federalism. To the liberal and radical élites and their followers, both anti-Jesuitism and the idea of the nation, resting on national unification as well as liberal-democratic freedom and equality, were the common goals and ideas that turned them into a powerful agent of change.25 In the spring of 1847, the intransigence of the seven Catholic–conservative cantons, which in 1845 had formed the separatist Sonderbund to prevent the revision of the Federal Pact of 1815—if necessary by military means—and their appeal for outside help, turned the conflict between ‘old’ and ‘young’ Switzerland into a question of its very existence as a nation. Thus, the national movement supported by the liberals and, especially, the radicals, grew into the crucial motor of the “Swiss Civil War” (Kohn) of 1847, the so-called Sonderbundskrieg (see Remak, 1993; Bucher, 1966). The nationalism of the liberal–radical variety was the integration ideology which, in the summer of 1847, united the reform forces, despite their divergent economic interests and political demands, into an alliance ready to resolve the national question by violent means: the radicals of western Switzerland (Geneva, Vaud) and of the Mittelland (Berne, Aargau) with the liberals and more moderate radicals of the industrialized east. In sociological terms, this brought together the radical petit bourgeois and rural inhabitants of the Mittelland with the liberal merchants, manufacturers and entrepreneurs of the eastern parts of Switzerland and their social allies. In the late summer of 1847, even the long-hesitant, liberal–conservative bourgeoisie

25

In fact, as early as December 1844 and March 1845, the radicals in two socalled Free Corps expeditions (Freischarenzügen) vainly attempted to overthrow the conservative government of Lucerne and to restore the liberals to power.

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of both east and west were unable to resist the pressure of nationalist demands. Radicalism thus decisively contributed to the fact that the political actors—the liberal and radical forces, as well as the conservatives— pushed events forward at all costs, ultimately seeking a settling of the national question by force of arms. Nevertheless, the more moderate liberals and radicals were able to lead political developments very much in their preferred direction. This became clear when they elected the liberal-conservative Henri Guillaume Dufour (1787–1855) as general of their military forces, and still more so in the drafting of the new Federal Constitution. Even though the radicals would ultimately not achieve all their goals, it was nevertheless the radical and national dynamic of 1847–48 which opened the road to a reform of the loose Federation of 1815, enabling Switzerland to create a stronger Confederation based upon democracy.26 The liberals and radicals of Europe welcomed the defeat of the Sonderbund as a victory of progress over tradition—as the beginning of a new era of freedom. They interpreted the civil war as a prelude to the national uprising of the European peoples, and as the beginning of a European revolution. In his poem, ‘Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss’ (In the Highlands rang the first shot), the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath gave expression to this belief. The Swiss liberals themselves, finding much to support their intentions in the European revolutions of 1848, expressed their solidarity with those movements. Numerous radicals even favored direct intervention on behalf of the revolutionaries in southern Germany and northern Italy. As in the rest of Europe of 1848, the idea of the nation promising democracy and progress was still the centerpiece of nationalism. In the sense of classical Risorgimento nationalism, the European nationalists strove for an ideal Europe of liberated and peacefully coexisting peoples and nations. However, as the aggressive verbal and armed conflicts in Switzerland demonstrated, liberal nationalism had its dark side. It could not do without exclusions and enemies. No nation without emotion,27 no national movement and national identity without reference to cultural similarities and differences—this was also true for a nation which, like the Confederation of 1848, was defined first and foremost by a shared, democratic state citizenship. 26

On the significance of economic interests for national unification, see Siegenthaler, 1985, pp. 117–40, esp. 123–28; as well as various contributions in Ernst et al., 1998; especially Jost, pp. 91–101; Halbeisen and Müller, pp. 117–36; and Humair, pp. 103–16. 27 On the significance of stage-managed festivities and public emotion in the construction of a national identity, see François et al., 1995.

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In 1848, after their victory over the Sonderbund—“the Swiss Glorious Revolution” (Kohn)—the liberals and radicals realized their utopia of a national state based upon democratic principles. The Federal Constitution introduced universal male suffrage at federal and cantonal level, and guaranteed legal equality, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, and free choice of residence. The Jews, however (numbering a little over 3,000 men, women, and children, some 0.3 percent of the Swiss population), were refused full civil and political equality. Free choice of residence and equality before the law were restricted to Swiss members of Christian churches, and freedom of religion was explicitly granted only to the recognized Christian denominations. Yet again, anti-Jewish prejudices and the fear of economic competition had triumphed over the demand for a consistent application of human rights. It was only in the 1860s that a radical–liberal alliance pushed for the abolition of discrimination against Jews as being irreconcilable with the principles of a “bourgeois state” (eines bürgerlichen Staates). The Catholic–conservative opposition, however, wished to uphold the restriction of civil rights to those of the ‘proper’ religion. This shows how strongly the Catholic–conservatives in particular were still attached to the concept of a ‘Christian Nation,’ and opposed to the consistent application of the principles of a nation founded on common citizenship (Mattioli, 1998, pp. 221, 228). The Federal state was a representative democracy. By forging closer links between the cantons and entrusting foreign policy solely to the Federation, it strengthened Switzerland’s independence. However, this state was anything but a centralized union; in many respects, the cantons maintained their autonomy. The two-chamber system emphasized the federal component. This was a concession to the smaller and medium-sized cantons and their fear of becoming too dependent on the larger ones in any other system. Some of the bigger cantons, especially Vaud and Geneva, both with radical governments and conscious of their linguistic and cultural traditions, played a decisive part in the devising of safeguards against centralist tendencies. The federalist structure of the new state disappointed many radicals who had hoped for greater centralization. In their opinion, the Confederation lacked sufficient powers, especially with regard to education and transport. They also felt that the principle of equality had not been fully upheld in the granting of political rights and freedom of residence. For example, to “enhance the national spirit,” and to “homogenize” the Swiss élites, they would have preferred much stronger coordination in military affairs. It was for the same reasons that they were utterly committed to a Swiss university. To the Catholic–conservative cantons, the new state was a winners’ dictate, despite its federalist structure, and their population voted

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against the Federal Constitution. National unification left them deeply traumatized for a long time afterwards. The threat represented by the liberal–radical majority, real and imagined, strengthened the cohesion of the Catholic–conservatives, leading to a leveling of Catholicism. Political Catholicism set off on its “march into the ghetto” (Altermatt). The federalist structure of the Confederation encouraged this development, allowing the Catholic–conservatives in particular cantons to establish what amounted to cultural refuges. Consequently, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the denominational differences between them and the reformed or the liberal–radical middle classes were more strongly emphasized than before. In the conflicts with the liberal Zeitgeist and with modern times in general, the struggle for a Catholic cultural identity turned into a struggle for the Roman Catholic Church, for the Pope and for the bishops (Altermatt, 1989, pp. 133–41). From a liberal–radical point of view, political Catholicism—owing to its ultramontane connections with Rome—was considered an unreliable, foreign element in the new nation-state.

VI. In near model fashion, Switzerland in 1848 was a nation founded on common citizenship. Shared citizenship, sovereignty of the people, and national autonomy formed the crucial legitimacy of national existence. To both liberals and radicals, these were infinitely more important than any alleged natural or historical union. “More strongly than language it is history, and more strongly than history it is freedom which unites peoples” (Stärker als die Sprache eint die Geschichte und stärker als die Geschichte die Freiheit die Völker): this is how, on 1 November 1848, the radical paper Schweizerische Nationalzeitung encapsulated the Confederation’s concept of a nation (quoted in Hunziker, 1970, p. 39). Around 1850, it was next to inconceivable to both liberals and radicals that it should ever occur to a national state to claim parts of other countries— Switzerland, for example—based on a shared linguistic–cultural background. Italian and German nationalism also subscribed to the principle of popular self-determination (see Hunziker, 1970, pp. 40–44, 49–54), but emphasized cultural, linguistic, and geographical elements at the same time. Early indications of the incompatibility of these views with Swiss liberal and radical nationalism were largely overlooked or dismissed as romanticizing tendencies that had little to do with the actual struggle to install a democratic nation-state. Up to the 1870s and beyond, the radicals continued to equate the principle of nationality with popular sovereignty and national autonomy, despite contrary developments in Germany and Italy. They refused to acknowledge the outward uni-

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formity of location or language as the most important characteristics of a state-nation and as an exclusive prerequisite for the creation of a nation-state. In the Swiss–Italian political conflict over Ticino at the time of Italian unification in 1859–62 (Hunziker, 1970, pp. 80–121), and in the course of the German national unification imposed by Bismarck, the liberals and radicals had to realize that their concept of nationhood corresponded less and less with that of the Italians and Germans, and that national self-determination, as the Swiss saw it, and the so-called nationality principle, were two different things. But they also realized that this might have consequences for Switzerland. For example, on 17 November 1866 the liberal daily Luzerner Zeitung wrote that the day was no longer far off “when nationalist policies will triumph not only by means of weapons, but also in the spirit of the peoples, leaving Switzerland alone in Europe with her Freedom burning over and above Nationalities” (quoted in Hunziker, 1970, p. 151). The national movements in the neighboring countries and their demands to apply the nationality principle posed no direct threat; it was not difficult to fend off territorial claims, such as that of Italy over Ticino. Ideology, however, posed a greater challenge. The “simple straightforwardness” (Frei) of the nationalists’ equation of language, ethnicity, and state soon triggered ideological counter-reactions in Swiss political discourse. In 1849, Johann Jakob Hottinger self-assuredly defined the Swiss national mission as the duty to justify democracy in the eyes of all the peoples of Europe (Hottinger, quoted in Frei, 1964, p. 214). Twenty years later, when various cantons had introduced direct democracy, Federal Councilor Jakob Dubs went so far as to claim that “the thorough treatment and solution of the question of expanding democracy constitutes our higher, if not universal mission in the world” (Dubs, quoted in Frei, 1964, p. 214). In the 1860s, in reaction to the strengthening of linguistic and cultural nationalism in Germany, Italy, and France, political discourse in Switzerland increasingly centered upon the multilingualism and cultural variety of the Confederation. Providing an early example in 1861, Ludwig Tobler believed Switzerland had been chosen by Providence, “by her mere existence to engage in spontaneous, peaceful propaganda for the truly Christian idea of friendship between the peoples, based upon equality and the interchange of the most diverse individualities, which is stirring ever more powerfully in modern cultural life” (Tobler, quoted in Frei, 1964, p. 213). With this guiding principle of demonstrating the peaceful coexistence of different languages and cultures, Swiss nationalism in the following decades generated not only a new justification for the existence of Switzerland as a nation-state, but also a new element of a Swiss

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sense of mission. Although the idea of the “fusion of three nations” had already surfaced in passing during the Helvetic period, it had remained completely marginal, and was to remain so for some time (Frei, 1964, p. 213, note 36). In 1870, however, the Federal Council adopted the idea in its confirmation of Swiss neutrality during the Franco–Prussian War, thereby giving it the weight of official doctrine. This line of argument remained untouched by the other elements of national ideology, at least for the time being. Rather, the various arguments and images to justify national existence overlapped. However, to declare multilingualism a core element of Swiss identity without jeopardizing national survival was only possible because Switzerland had found an institutional solution to the language issue before it acquired its explosive force with the rise of cultural and linguistic nationalism in Europe after 1860–70 (Altermatt, 1996, p. 147). In 1848, as in the preceding debates on a new state order, language was not an issue. In contrast with the denominational conflicts, which had repeatedly threatened the Old Confederation and impeded its modernization until 1848, multilingualism was never a virulent problem. Neither did it obstruct national mobilization, in part for the simple reason that both the liberal and the radical élites from the bourgeois middle classes usually had the necessary linguistic skills. Another reason why the linguistic areas resisted encapsulation during the rise of nationalistic discourse was the fact that German- and French-speaking liberals and radicals needed support from both sides to secure their revolutionary régime in the uncertain period before 1847 (Siegenthaler, 1998, pp. 127–28). The equality of the three national languages—German, French, and Italian—remained undisputed in the new Federal state. Following the so-called territorial principle, it left language policy entirely up to the cantons (Altermatt, 1996, pp. 115–16, 141–45).28 Anyone taking up residence anywhere in Switzerland had to adopt the cantonal or communal language as their school and official language. While the Old Confederation had known clear denominational boundaries, more or less sharply defined linguistic territories came into existence after 1848. For business with the Federal authorities, one of the national languages had to be used. Decentralized authority over official and school languages left the reconciliation of individual freedom of language and collective linguistic tradition to the cantons. Language protection was thus assigned to territorial bodies rather than personal associations. Swiss constitutional law still does not recognize any corporate linguistic blocs. 28

The Federal State of 1848 thus resolved the language issue in a manner similar to that in which the Old Confederation had dealt with the confessional division, according to the pragmatic formula “cuius regio eius religio” or “cuius regio eius lingua.”

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In contrast to Belgium, for example, the linguistic communities do not have at their disposal any particular state institutions or specific political bodies at the federal level. Due to the territorial principle, the three linguistic regions have remained comparatively homogeneous, despite a high degree of industrialization and mobility. However, the immigration of foreign workers from the 1890s to 1914, and after 1950, perforated this linguistic homogeneity, presenting Swiss society with the challenge of further integrating linguistic and cultural traditions. Around 1900, as the Fremdenfrage, the “alien problem,” grew increasingly urgent, neoconservative circles created an effective metaphor to exclude everyone and everything they claimed to be non-Swiss by coining the term Überfremdung, “excessive foreign infiltration” (Arlettaz, 1985, pp. 83–180). The issue of foreign immigration also demonstrates, however, that culturalist, even ethnic and racist traits came to the fore in the political discourse on national identity of late-nineteenth-century republican– democratic Switzerland (Jost, 1998b, pp. 65–78; Keller, 1998, pp. 360–54). Self-centered exclusion and differentiation began to influence the national self-image, undermining—especially in the inter-war period—the construction of Switzerland as an open and democratic nation founded on common citizenship29—with far-reaching consequences up to the present day.

VII. Even more than the rising linguistic and cultural nationalism of the neighboring countries, it was the clash of nationalism and internationalism, as well as domestic developments—especially the rise of the labor movement—which determined the ideological and political direction of Swiss nationalism from the late 1860s onwards. With their idea of the unified people as the basis of nation and state, even the early liberals and radicals had required citizens to close ranks, both outwardly and inwardly, against papism and political Catholicism. Especially in the 1880s, when social differences grew more intense in the now fully developed class society of Switzerland, the nation was increasingly idealized and presented as a “parable of uniformity and unification” in order to bridge these internal differences and contrasts. On the radical–liberal side, the ideological elevation of the nation and the people as a body of united citizens was increasingly used to remind Swiss workers of their patriotic duty and to exclude the ever more confident labor movement. An initial thrust in this direction occurred as early as the rise of the First International, and in connection with the

29

For an introduction to this issue, see Mooser, 1997, pp. 685–708.

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Paris Commune. Especially after 1885, the bourgeois side launched what amounted to a carefully staged “thrust of national-historical ideology formation,” with the explicit goal of strengthening the national consciousness of the population in order to overcome internal tensions and to consolidate national cohesion.30 At the same time, a mutual rapprochement occurred between the ruling liberal–radical circles and the Catholic–conservatives, the losers in the Sonderbundskrieg of 1847. In the 1840s, and again during the Kulturkampf of the early 1870s, political Catholicism had been marginalized as an unreliable, foreign element in the new national state owing to its ultramontane connections with Rome. In the 1880s, however, it abandoned its fundamental opposition to the Swiss national state. This was made easier not only by Catholic–conservative successes in plebiscites following the introduction of the legislative referendum at the national level by the revised Federal Constitution of 1874, but also by the fact that it was a conflict between church and state rather than between church and nation. Most importantly, however, the Catholic– conservative opposition and its electorate largely continued to identify with Switzerland even after 1848 and despite their “march into the ghetto” (Altermatt). When a Catholic–conservative was elected Federal Councilor in 1891, the mutual rapprochement finally led to an historic compromise between the former opponents in the struggle for national union (Altermatt, 1989, pp. 151–54; Tanner, 1996, pp. 184–212). This tendency towards reintegration of the Catholic–conservatives was accompanied by a new wave of ideological appropriation of national history. With a view to the celebration of its 600th anniversary, the Federation of 1291 was turned into a kind of “Magna Carta of the confederation’s law, state order, national autonomy and freedom.”31 Old political and social contrasts were blurred by historical symbolism. The ideological emphasis on the Old Confederates “ultimately ascribed modern liberal-democratic rights to the late medieval struggle of Alpine peasants for an independent state” and elevated the very “centers of resistance against state modernization to the place of origin of modern freedom” (Siegenthaler, 1985, p. 455). The assertion of a symbiosis of city and country, peasants and burghers since the Middle Ages had a similar integrating function. Using this fresh interpretation of the founding myth, both the conservatives and the liberal–radicals created the 30

On the exacerbation of social contrasts, see Tanner, 1995, pp. 504–19, 694–704; on the issue of nationalization, see Widmer, 1992, pp. 619–38. 31 This is the interpretation of the Confederation according to the report by the majority of the committee of the Council of States concerning the anniversary, Schweizerisches Bundesblatt 1890, Vol. III, p. 1085. On the construction of the myth of 1291, see Kreis, 1991.

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guiding principles which allowed both sides to identify with the prevailing political order, and helped them overcome their ideological and political differences. An important role in the construction of these new guidelines was played by national historiography. It bestowed greater historic glory and timelessness on the prevailing order and power structure of modern bourgeois society, especially by its interpretation of the Old Confederation as a peasant state. The frumen, edlen Puren or “pious, noble peasants” of the late Middle Ages, even then perceived as “figures of ideological identification” (Marchal) to legitimize the overthrow of the traditional estate system by the Old Confederates as an act of divine will, emerged as the original core, the essence of the Swiss people. Constitutional tradition was based on these rural ‘founding fathers.’ Moreover, historians ultimately explained the successful creation of a state in the fifteenth century as the result of a fortunate combination of urban and rural elements (Sablonier and Weishaupt, 1991, pp. 11–27). The assertion of a symbiosis between town and country, peasants and burghers from the Middle Ages onwards helped to legitimize the forging of a combined bourgeois and farmers’ faction, both on the liberal–radical and on the Catholic–conservative side. As earlier against the aristocracy, the peasants became a “political propaganda figure,” albeit this time in the struggle against the Left. The prestige of the rural population was further enhanced by the peasant ideology promoted by bourgeois circles, and especially by the Farmers’ Union (Bauernverband) founded in 1897–98. This ideology declared the farmers, the “nourishing estate” in general, to be an everlasting source of physical and spiritual power for the people and the nation, to be a refuge of morality and of the Christian faith, but also a bulwark against the social excesses of industrialization and urbanization, especially the proletariat and its internationalism. In this way, both national historiography and peasant ideology turned the farmers into the True Swiss, and Switzerland into an agricultural state—at a time when Switzerland had long been an industrialized society (Baumann, 1998, pp. 356–62). This nationalist surge consolidated the Confederation at the expense of the excluded labor movement, at least until aggressive nationalisms and imperialisms escalated into the First World War. In Urs Altermatt’s eyes, the Kulturkampf ultimately enhanced national integration. After 1848, important conflicts arose from religious–cultural and federalist issues, dividing the country into two—radical–liberal and Catholic–conservative—camps. The language problem played only a secondary role, if that. As in the run-up to 1848, linguistic barriers mattered little during the Kulturkampf. The conflict created a multicultural network of ideological and political loyalties which structured the multilingual

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state on different grounds (exclusion of the socialist workers’ movement; xenophobia, for example, against Italian workers; economic interests shared by the farmers and the export industry, and so on), grounds which ultimately strengthened national cohesion. Once the gap created in 1914 between French- and German-speaking Switzerland had been bridged after 1918–19, bourgeois politicians and intellectuals idealized multilingualism, together with federalism and neutrality, as the very raison d’être of the Swiss state. At the same time, the republican–democratic ideal of the state-nation, in which political participation constitutes the core of state citizenship, slipped into the background. Subsequently, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Swiss nationalism mutated increasingly into an ideology of integration and exclusion, although no longer at the expense of the Catholic–conservative Right, but of the organized labor and trade union movement of the Left. Nationalism grew into a strategy to preserve the power of the ruling classes and a weapon to defend the prevailing order and favor specific interests. By asserting that national democracy prevented the class rule of a propertied minority and removed any grounds for revolution, this new nationalism challenged the legitimacy of the Left’s advanced political and social ideas.32 Bourgeois values based on family, private property, fatherland, and army, however, became unassailable. Attitudes vis-à-vis nation and Fatherland became the touchstone of all political forces. This went hand in hand with enhanced prestige for the army, which merged with the nation to form one unit, the guardian of order at home (strike-breaking operations) and outward security. The liberal mentor, Carl Hilty, set the motto for the newly formed alliance, “patriots within the Confederation,” which was: “Distance yourselves from mere class interests and class representations; pit the Fatherland against the classes.”33 In order to preserve the citizens’ loyalty to their state, cultural, religious, and authoritarian values were increasingly brought to the fore. Enlisting state support, the national élites advanced the nationalization of cultural life. Mythical and quasi-religious revelations began to replace the political–rational character of the nation; there was an even greater rapprochement of nation and emotion. Along with this new nationalist impulse, new rituals and hallowed spaces were created, leading to a plethora of national festivals, buildings, works of art, and monuments (Jost, 1989, pp. 293–303; Brühlmeier, 1998, pp. 61–74). Switzerland

32

On the position of the Left between national integration and exclusion, see Tanner, 1996, pp. 201–208, and Müller, 1998, pp. 253–70. 33 Carl Hilty in Politisches Jahrbuch, 1898, pp. 437, 440.

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increasingly fell victim to an historicizing self-definition. Political discourse became dominated by references to a “nation of will” or Willensnation, which was claimed to have constituted itself over time by closing in on itself, against all the odds of linguistic, denominational, and cultural heterogeneity (Siegenthaler, 1994, p. 131). In the inter-war period, these mental constructs, arranged around such historicizing myths as those of the Old Confederates and the peasants, freedom and the Alps, hardened completely under communist and fascist pressure. On the one hand, they grew into an unquestioned national foundation, turning Switzerland into a “fortress island” in the European ocean of wars. On the other hand, belief in the formative powers of the soil and the embodiment of Swissness in a genuine, socalled Homo alpinus helveticus, was at once a biological and a geological underpinning of national identity, especially in bourgeois-conservative circles, who used it to proclaim the eternity of the nation (Sarasin et al., 1998, p. 28). In the early twentieth century, the “educational national ideology” (Guggenbühl) thereby turned the structural heterogeneity of Switzerland, its strong federalism, and its cultural and linguistic variety into a kind of national virtue. Using the metaphors of Willensnation and of “unity in plurality” (Einheit in der Vielfalt), it celebrated the increasing solipsism of Switzerland in the twentieth century as an expression of national character, as a symbol of freedom and autonomy (Guggenbühl, 1998, pp. 34–45). The notion of nationhood based on political will and mutual solidarity, however, persisted, in spite of the many changes wrought by historical myths, the hardening of national selfprojections, and the conflicting tendencies of self-sufficiency and arrogant missionary fervor (the latter perhaps a reaction to the smallness of the country). Even today, the concept of a nation defined by shared citizenship remains a pre-eminent feature of Swiss national identity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alter, Peter. 1985. Nationalismus. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. Altermatt, Urs. 1989. Katholizismus und Moderne. Zürich: Benziger. ———. 1996. Das Fanal von Sarajewo. Ethnonationalismus in Europa. Paderborn: Schöningh. Altermatt, Urs, Catherine Bosshart-Pfluger, and Albert Tanner, eds. 1998. Die Konstruktion einer Nation. Nation und Nationalisierung in der Schweiz, 18.–20. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Chronos. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Andrey, Georges. 1986. ‘Auf der Suche nach dem neuen Staat (1798–1848),’ in Geschichte der Schweiz und der Schweizer. Basel: Helbling & Lichtenhahn.

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Arlettaz, Gérald. 1985. ‘Démographie et identité nationale (1850–1914). La Suisse et “La question des étrangers”,’ in Etudes et Sources 11. Bern. Baumann, Werner. 1998. ‘Verbäuerlichung der Nation- Nationalisierung der Bauern,’ in Tanner and Osterwalder. Böning, Holger. 1998. Der Traum von Freiheit und Gleichheit. Helvetische Revolution und Republik (1798–1803). Die Schweiz auf dem Weg zur bürgerlichen Demokratie. Zürich: O. Füssli. Borner, Heidi. 1981. Zwischen Sonderbund und Kulturkampf. Zur Lage der Besiegten im Bundesstaat von 1848. Luzern: Rex-Verlag. Brühlmeier, Markus. 1998. ‘Die Nation im Dorf. Imagologische Bastelei am Beispiel der Gemeinde Hinwil, 1848–1914,’ in Altermatt et al. Bucher, Erwin. 1966. Die Geschichte des Sonderbundskrieges. Zürich: Verlag Berichthaus. Couture, Jocelyne, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour. 1996. ‘Afterword: Liberal Nationalism. Both Cosmopolitan and Rooted,’ in Rethinking Nationalism, Canadian Journalism of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 22. Craig, Gordon. 1988. Geld und Geist. Zürich im Zeitalter des Liberalismus 1830– 1869. Munich: Beck. Originally published as The Triumph of Liberalism: Zurich in the Golden Age, 1830–1869. New York: Scribner. Dubs, Jakob. 1868. Die schweizerische Demokratie in ihrer Fortentwicklung. Zürich. Ernst, Andreas, Albert Tanner, and Matthias Weishaupt. 1998. Revolution und Innovation. Die konfliktreiche Entstehung des schweizerischen Bundesstaates von 1848. Zürich: Chronos. François, Etienne, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vogel, eds. 1995. Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. François, Etienne, and Hagen Schulze. 1998. ‘Das emotionale Fundament der Nation,’ in Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches Panorama, ed. Monika Flacke. Berlin: Koehler & Amelang. Frei, Daniel. 1964. Die Förderung des schweizerischen Nationalbewusstseins nach dem Zusammenbruch der Alten Eidgenossenschaft 1798. Zürich: Juris. Gasser, Adolf. 1947. ‘Der Irrweg der Helvetik,’ in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte. Giesen, Bernhard. 1993. Die Intellektuellen und die Nation. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Gotthelf, Jeremias. n. d. Sämtliche Werke, Ergänzungsband 13. Gruner, Erich. 1977. Die Parteien in der Schweiz. Bern: Francke. Guggenbühl, Christoph. 1998a. ‘Biedermänner und Musterbürger im “Mutterland der Weltfreyheit.” Konzepte der Nation in der helvetischen Republik,’ in Altermatt et al. ———. 1998b. ‘Von Untertanen zu Staatsbürgern. Voraussetzungen der Bundesstaatsgründung aus längerfristiger Perspektive,’ in Tanner and Osterwalder. Guzzi-Heeb, Sandro. 1998. ‘Helvetischer Staat und Nationalisierung der Gesellschaft’, in Altermatt el al. Habermas, Jürgen. 1994. ‘Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität. Überlegungen zur europäischen Zukunft,’ in Projekt Europa. Postnationale Identität: Grundlage für eine europäische Demokratie, ed. Nicole Dewandre and Jacques Lenoble. Berlin.

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Halbeisen, Patrick, and Margrit Müller. 1998. ‘Ökonomische Motive und Erwartungen—ihr Einfluss auf die Bundesstaatsgründung,’ in Ernst et al. Hettling, Manfred. 1998. ‘Die Schweiz als Erlebnis,’ in Altermatt et al. Hildbrand, Thomas, and Albert Tanner. 1991. Im Zeichen der Revolution. Der Weg zum schweizerischen Bundesstaat 1798–1848. Zürich: Chronos. Hobsbawn, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hottinger, Johann Jakob. 1850. ‘Die Aufgabe der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft insoweit dieselbe durch ihre Geschichte bestimmt wird,’ talk given on 4 October 1849. Zürich: no publisher. Hroch, Miroslav. 1985 (1971). ‘Das Erwachen kleiner Nationen als Problem der komparativen Forschung,’ in Nationalismus, ed. Heinrich A. Winkler. Königstein/Ts: Athenäum. Humair, Cédric. 1998. ‘Etat fédéral, centralisation douanière et développement industriel de la Suisse, 1798–1848,’ in Ernst et al. Hunziker, Guido. 1970. Die Schweiz und das Nationalitätsprinzip im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Einstellung der eidgenössischen Öffentlichkeit zum Gedanken des Nationalstaates. Basel/Stuttgart: Helbing & Lichtenhahn. Imhof, Ulrich, and François de Capitani. 1983. Die Helvetische Gesellschaft. Spätaufklärung und Vorrevolution in der Schweiz. Frauenfeld/Stuttgart: Huber. Jaggi, Arnold. 1948. ‘Über die Begriffe “Nation,” “Nationalität” und “national” in der Zeit des Kampfes um die Bundesrevision,’ in Archiv des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Bern. Bern. Jost, Hans Ulrich. 1989. ‘La nation, la politique et les arts,’ in Revue Suisse d’histoire. ———. 1992. Zur Geschichte des Vereinswesens in der Schweiz, in: Handbuch der schweizerischen Volkskultur, Vol. 1. Zürich: Offizin. ———. 1998a. ‘Der Bundesstaat von 1848 im Kontext des “langen” 19. Jahrhunderts,’ in Ernst et al. ———. 1998b. ‘Der Helvetische Nationalismus. Nationale Identität, Patriotismus, Rassismus und Ausgrenzungen in der Schweiz des 20. Jahrhunderts,’ in Nationalismus, Multikulturalismus und Ethnizität, ed. Hans Rudolf Wicker. Bern/Stuttgart/Vienna: Paul Hampt. Keller, Christoph. 1998. ‘Ob es den reinrassigen Schweizer gebe. Otto Schlaginhaufen und die Rassenfrage,’ in Tanner and Osterwalder. Kohn, Hans. 1956. Nationalism and Liberty. The Swiss Example. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Kreis, Georg. 1991. Der Mythos von 1291. Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt. Lang, Josef. 1998. ‘“Vernünftig und katholisch zugleich.” Katholische Radikale und antiklerikale Dynamik,’ in Ernst et al. Marchal, Guy P. 1990. ‘Die “Alten Eidgenossen” im Wandel der Zeiten. Das Bild der frühen Eidgenossen im Traditionsbewusstsein und in der Identitätsvorstellung der Schweizer vom 15. bis ins 20. Jh.,’ in Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft, Vol. 2. Olten: Walter-Verlag. ———. 1992. ‘Das “Schweizeralpenland”: eine imagologische Bastelei,’ in Erfundene Schweiz/La Suisse imaginée. Konstruktionen nationaler Identität/ Bricolages d’une identité nationale, ed. Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli. Zürich: Chronos.

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Mattioli, Aram. 1998. ‘“Vaterland der Christen” oder “bürgerlicher Staat”? Die Schweiz und die jüdische Emanzipation, 1848–1874’, in Altermatt et al. Meyerhofer, Ursula. 1998. ‘Wir sind die Nation. Der radikale Nationsbegriff des “Schweizerischen Republikaners” 1830–1846,’ in Altermatt et al. Mooser, Josef. 1997. ‘Die “Geistige Landesverteidigung” in den 1930er Jahren,’ in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte. Morgan, Edmund Sears. 1988. Inventing the People. The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: Norton. Müller, Felix. 1998. ‘Lieber national als international. Der Grütliverein zwischen nationaler und sozialer Identifikation,’ in Altermatt et al. Remak, Joachim. 1993. A Very Civil War. The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847. Boulder: Westview Press. Renan, Ernest. 1934 (1882). Qu’ est-ce qu’une nation?. Paris. Sablonier, Roger. 1992. ‘Die “Bauernstaat”-Ideologie,’ in Neue Studien zum Schweizerischen Nationalbewusstsein. Itinera 13. Sablonier, Roger, and Matthias Weishaupt. 1991. Die alte Schweiz als “Bauernstaat”. National Research Project 21. Basel. Sarasin, Philipp et al. 1998. ‘ImagiNation. Eine Einleitung’, in Tanner and Osterwalder. Sciarini, Pascal, Simon Hug, and Cédric Dupont. 1998. ‘Example, Exception or Both? Swiss National Identity in Perspective’, paper presented at the Conference on ‘Nation and National Identities’, Zurich 1998. A revised version of this paper will appear in Defining and Projecting Europe’s Identity: Issues and Trade-Offs, ed. Lars-Erik Cederman. Siegenthaler, Hansjörg. 1985. ‘Die Schweiz 1850-1914’, in Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1994. ‘Supranationalität, Nationalismus und regionale Autonomie. Erfahrungen des schweizerischen Bundesstaates—Perspektiven der europäischen Gemeinschaft’, in traverse, Zeitschrift für Geschichte 3. Simon, Christian. 1991. ‘Die Helvetik—Eine aufgezwungene und gescheiterte Revolution?,’ in Hildbrand and Tanner. Tanner, Albert. 1991a. ‘Das Recht auf Revolution. Radikalismus—Antijesuitismus—Nationalismus,’ in Hildbrand and Tanner. ———. 1991b. ‘“Alles für das Volk.” Die liberalen Bewegungen von 1830–31,’ in Hildbrand and Tanner. ———. 1995. Arbeitsame Patrioten—Wohlanständige Damen. Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit in der Schweiz 1830–1914. Zürich: Orell Füssli Verlag. ———. 1996. ‘Direkte Demokratie und soziopolitische Integration des Mittelstandes, der Arbeiterschaft und Bauern in der Schweiz, 1830–1914’, in Wirtschaftliche und soziale Integration in historischer Sicht, ed. E. Schremmer, VSWG-Beiheft 128. Stuttgart: Steiner. ———. 1999. ‘Die Schweiz auf dem Weg zur modernen Demokratie. Von der helvetischen Republik zum Bundesstaat von 1848,’ in Traditionen der Republik—Wege der Demokratie, ed. Rupert Moser. Bern: P. Lang. Tanner, Albert, and Daniel Osterwalder. 1998. ‘Flawyler Volksversammlung vom 7. August 1836’, in Die Erfindung der Schweiz 1848–1998. Bildentwürfe einer Nation, ed. Schweizerisches Landesmuseum. Zürich: Chronos. Tobler, Ludwig. 1861. Über die schweizerische Nationalität.

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Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1995. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1849–1918. Munich: C. H. Beck. Weishaupt, Matthias. 1991. Bauern, Hirten und “frume edle puren.” Bauern und Bauernstandsideologie in der spätmittelalterlichen Eidgenossenschaft und der nationalen Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz. Zürich: Chronos. ———. 1998. ‘Bruderliebe und Heldentod. Geschichtsbilder und Geschichtskultur in Festreden am schweizerischen Schützenfest in Glarus 1847,’ in Revolution und Innovation. Die konfliktreiche Entstehung des schweizerischen Bundesstaates von 1848, ed. Andreas Ernst, Albert Tanner, and Matthias Weishaupt. Zürich: Chronos. Widmer, Thomas. 1992. Die Schweiz in der Wachstumskrise der 1880er Jahre. Zürich: Chronos. Würgler, Andreas. 1998. ‘Revolution aus Tradition. Die Legitimierung der Revolutionen aus den Unruhen des Ancien régime durch die schweizerische Nationalhistoriografie des 19. Jhs.,’ in Ernst et al.

The Identity Problems of the Austro-German Liberals VILMOS HEISZLER

I. In many respects, the history of liberalism in Austria confronts us with exactly the same problems as the history of Austria in general, namely: What does it mean to be ‘Austrian’? Is there an ‘Austrian identity’ as such, and can we use such a term in the context of and with reference to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? These questions are almost unavoidable and have to be addressed especially when we analyze national issues. Liberalism, which is closely connected to nationalism, is especially difficult from this point of view. In the case of other ideological trends (conservatism, socialism, and so on), these problems can be resolved much more easily, or the whole dilemma can simply be avoided. Liberalism in Europe usually originated from the gentry intellectual reform movements, inspired by the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century the different trends of liberalism first confronted the national movements but later were absorbed by them. The cosmopolitan attitude of the Enlightenment was increasingly replaced by a proud national commitment all over Europe. The German-speaking inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire should have had a strong desire to belong to the German nation and should have chosen a German identity. It is true that there was—and still is—such a tendency among the Austro-Germans, but the problem is much more complicated. Indeed, for most German-speaking citizens in Austria, belonging to the German nation, so to speak, had never been very attractive. Apart from the fact that German development itself was not unified and that the different German regions had other strong outside commitments, there were special ‘Austrian’ reasons for keeping their independence. Before 1806, when they were subjects of a ruler who held the prestigious title of Holy Roman Emperor; they could consider themselves the most exclusive and privileged branch of the German family. The same feeling could somehow be justified even after the establishment of the German Confederation in 1815. In addition to these relatively abstract historical and emotional motives, there were other, more practical polit-

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ical and economic reasons why the Austro-Germans preferred to remain separate. It was more advantageous for them to belong to the Habsburg Empire than to a Greater Germany. If they had decided to join a Greater German nation-state, they would have lost all their political and economic privileges. All the advantages of belonging to a Greater Germany would not have been sufficient to compensate them for these losses. The Habsburgs’ mercantile customs policy, for example, was undoubtedly beneficial for the craftsmen and trading bourgeoisie of the empire. This was because it guaranteed them a non-competitive market and thus one they could exploit. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie in Austria was almost exclusively of German origin, and the centralized state apparatus provided jobs and career possibilities for German-speaking citizens in particular.1 In other words, the Habsburg Empire was potentially attractive for the Besitz- and the Bildungsbürgertum type of bourgeoisie, these two typical by-products of German capitalist development. The Habsburg Empire was a unique state formation in many respects. Its unity was based entirely on coercion and the strength of the Habsburg dynasty. No common language, collective history, or shared interests could serve as a cohesive force to bind together the different peoples of the empire. (Nevertheless, the question of whether there were common interests is still a subject of serious debate among historians.) The only integrative force that might have brought the different nations of the empire together was a kind of solidarity between suppressed peoples. Interestingly, in many Western European countries, dynasties played a similarly important role in the establishment of nation-states, although the process in Austria was different. For various historical and ethnic reasons, in France, Spain, and Great Britain, for example, where there were also powerful dynasties, the strongly centralized states were easily transformed into nation-states. However, within France, Spain, and Great Britain, where the Northern French, Castilian Spanish, and the English were in the majority and also in power, the various national minorities in the neighboring territories had close cultural and linguistic ties with them, and this made it relatively easy for, for example, the Provençal, Aragonese, and Scottish minorities to integrate into developing modern nation-states. In the Habsburg Empire this route to development was not viable. All the minority nations were very different from the Germans, both culturally and linguistically. Most of them had long national traditions as independent nation-states dating back to the Middle Ages. Their proud national identity made it almost impossible for the Austro-Germans to assimilate them. The fact that the Germans

1

See Preradovich, 1955; and Allmayer-Beck, 1957.

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were not in an absolute majority within the empire made this task even more difficult. Instead of consensus, the unity of the empire was, as already mentioned, based on force and inertia. The Germans, who had a somewhat privileged position in Austria, were unable to integrate the empire. Instead, they separated themselves at the top of society and endeavored to ‘civilize’ the less developed neighboring nations. Josephinism was an appropriate ideology for the role of integration as well as for the modernization program, of which the country had been in urgent need since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

II. Josephinism was a typically Central and Eastern European phenomenon. Its main objective was to modernize the state from above, which, at the same time, demonstrated the then weakness of the bourgeoisie. Josephinism emphasized the supremacy of the Germans in the region and provided an ideology against the old feudal society. Josephinism tended to civilize the population of the empire providing the ideology of enlightement against backwardness, and at the same time modernizing and germanizing it. It is obvious that the Austro-German bourgeoisie gladly supported it. Being aware of their weakness, the bourgeoisie would never have dared to start an open fight against the still strong feudal orders. But once the ruling power declared war against the obsolete feudal system, the bourgeoisie was more than happy to join in. This was the first time in the history of Austria that the bourgeoisie had given a sign of its strong affinity for state paternalism, a pattern of behavior that later became so typical. From this time on, their attitude became the most distinguishing characteristic of the bourgeoisie in Austria—to a certain extent, this is true even today. The Viennese bourgeoisie had close ties with the state and especially with the court, both socially and economically. The title ‘court supplier’ was aspired to by many. Similarly, it was highly advantageous for the entrepreneurs of the imperial capital to supply the court and the central offices of administration. The close relationship with the court determined their whole mentality: this is the origin of the Biedermeier-gemütlich attitude of the Viennese.2 Self-interest as well as ideology made it desirable for the German citizens of Austria not only to belong to the Habsburg Empire, but also to accept the existing state and the ruling dynasty. It was under these circumstances that the weak plant of Austrian liberalism started to grow.

2

See Valjavec, 1945; Winter, 1941; Kann, 1962; Schiller, n. d; and Lukács, 1965, chapter I.

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Although the Francis–Metternich regime tried to suppress every individual initiative, and, according to the iron logic of historical determinism, it would have been impossible to develop any progressive movement, from the very beginning liberalism in Austria gave rise to many original ideas. One such idea emanated from Baron Andrian-Werburg, who, like his Hungarian and Bohemian contemporaries, endeavored to develop a counterbalance to the strong central power from the withering institutions of the feudal state. His work was later continued by Fischhof, who became famous for his concept of democracy and autonomy.3 Although the feudal representative bodies’ sphere of authority was becoming more and more restricted, they played an important role in the development of progressive thinking in Austria. These were the institutions where ideology and practice could be confronted and where the statesmen of the subsequent regime (Bach, Schmerling) could gain political experience.4

III. The year 1848 was a decisive turning point in the history of the AustroGermans. As a result of the revolutions within the empire, they had to face one of the most crucial dilemmas: should they choose the Habsburg Empire or Germany? They had to take all the pros and cons into consideration and to rethink the relationship between the two countries. In the beginning, the interests of the empire and its German-speaking citizens seemed to coincide. On the one hand, the court was ready to make constitutional compromises, and on the other, when war broke out in Italy, many Austro-Germans joined Radetzky’s army as volunteers. Archduke John and Schmerling were taking part in discussions at the Imperial Executive Committee of the National Assembly in Frankfurt to establish a unified Germany under the leadership of the Habsburgs. The Habsburg dynasty and the Austro-Germans shared a precious dream, which seemed at the time to be realistic: Austrian leadership in Germany and Austro-German hegemony in the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian liberals had only one serious stipulation: they wanted constitutional guarantees for the newly rich bourgeoisie of the industrial revolution that would enable them to take part in the state and political life of

3

See Andrian-Werburg, 1847; Redlich, 1920, Vol. I. p. 77, 265.(fn.); Kann, 1964, Vol. II. pp. 47–101, and 149–160. For Fischhof ’s brochures see: Fischhof, 1866, 1868; (Vienna, 1868); Charmatz, 1910; Franz, 1955, pp. 310–380; Cahnman, 1959, pp. 111–139. 4 See Tezner, 1901; and Redlich, 1920, Vol. I.

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Austria. Once these constitutional rights had been assured to the liberals, their loyalty to the dynasty could have been taken for granted. (The Viennese rebellions of May and October 1848, which forced the Court to flee on both occasions, were led and dominated by the radical-democrat and German nationalist elements, mostly students and workers.) Nevertheless, the dynasty was still hesitant and unwilling to compromise. It still preferred to resort to force to solve the basic problems of the Habsburg Empire and Germany. After a short period of wearing the uncomfortable disguise of a constitutional democrat, the new Emperor and his new Prime Minister, Prince Schwarzenberg, gave up the pretense and quickly dissolved the Constituent Assembly. This assembly had previously been dispatched to Kremsier to complete its task. Everybody understood the message: from now on, they would lean on the army, led at this time by the triumvirate of Windischgraetz, Jela∑i∆, and Radetzky. The constitutional activity of the Kremsier Assembly had proved to be in vain. The Assembly’s progressive ideas about what constituted a modern state were unacceptable to the new regime. According to the new constitution, the government would have been accountable to the Parliament, universal civil rights would have been exercised by the citizens, and provincial and local self-governments would have been set up. But all these ideas were aborted. Similarly futile was the attempt of the Assembly at creating fixed yet flexible frameworks for the coexistence of different nationalities through a clever combination of provincial and local self-government. The draft became no more than a document in the history of ideas. At first the victorious counter-revolution wished to pacify the public at home and abroad with an imposed constitution (but it never came into practice). This was followed in 1851 by unconcealed absolute rule.5

IV. The Austro-German bourgeoisie was ready for compromises: two of their leaders involved in ’48, Bach and Schmerling, were in the cabinet. However, the paths of the two ministers were ramified spectacularly: called “the minister of barricades” by his adversaries in the government, Bach “fought” with the enthusiasm of a neophyte to become one of the most hated figures of the neo-absolutist regime, whereas Schmerling, shocked by Schwarzenberg’s uninhibited and cynical dictatorial measures, left the government disillusioned (though ten years later he proved that his illusions had not disappeared completely). With Schmerling, the last representative of constitutional centralism had left the government.

5

See Friedjung, 1908; Rath, 1955; and Geist-Lányi, 1920.

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Having no opportunity to act on the political stage, the middle classes again withdrew to the spheres of economy and culture, continuing the Biedermeier traditions and anticipating the magnificent fin-de-siécle economic and cultural efflorescence in Vienna. The favourable world economic tendencies and minister of commerce Bruck’s moves in support of Austrian capital facilitated a massive upswing, which reinforced the inclination of the Austrian middle classes, in any case averse to taking risks, to put up with the safe and comfortable, though far from free, conditions. These traits of their mentality are easy to detect even today. Schwarzenberg’s Mitteleuropa conception of economically uniting the Habsburg Empire and Germany might have been imposing, but it certainly did not please Austrian industry, growing behind the safe Austrian customs frontiers, because the demolition of these customs lines would have put it into competition with a dynamically developing German industry.6 As is customary with dictatorships when in a quandary, the hardpressed absolutist regime was forced to make the first concessions in the form of new taxes to avoid the total collapse of its finances. In the “reinforced imperial council,” convoked to decide on the new taxes and discuss the budget, the party lines of the forthcoming political scene were already crystallized: the aristocrats, most of whom came from the Slavic provinces, belonged to the political Right, while the German members of parliament, most of whom came from the upper middle class or worked as civil servants, took seats on the Left. This political distinction continued to prevail for a long time in Austria. At the same time, both parties agreed that the most important issue was the destruction of the absolutist system. Nevertheless, the way they proceeded to achieve this demise was very different. While the Germans wanted to preserve the state system in its unity and to improve it only by constitutional means, their Slavic opponents intended to establish a federal state based on historical borders. Thus, there were rifts not only between Right and Left, but also between centralists and federalists, and, in an ideological sense, between liberals and conservatives. As far as the nationalistic aspect was concerned, the main confrontation lay between Germans and non-Germans. After the short federalist attempt of the October Diploma in 1860, Schmerling became Prime Minister. Although he blended some constitutional elements into his style of ruling, basically he followed a policy

6

See Friedjung, 1908; Redlich, 1925–26, vol. II; Friedjung, 1920; Charmatz, 1947; Charmatz, 1920; Hantsch, 1962; Molisch, 1944; Fellner, 1955; Plener, 1911; Somogyi, 1976.

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of strong centralism with a definite bias towards German tendencies. The Austro-German bourgeoisie expected Schmerling to realize their dreams. These were the same dreams that had been aborted years earlier, in 1848: they hoped that his efforts to establish a united Germany under the leadership of the constitutional Habsburg Empire, within which the Austro-Germans would play the dominant role, would soon succeed. This solution would have offered them not only fulfillment, but also—for want of a better expression—a comfortable position. They could have been loyal subjects of the empire, ardent German patriots, and liberal politicians at the same time; last but not least, they could have enjoyed the economic abundance of the Habsburg Monarchy. Schmerling promised constitutional order and constitutionally structured governance to German citizens. This was about the time when the Austro-German liberals established their political party, the Verfassungspartei (Constitution Party), even the name of which reflected their main political demand: constitutional government. It was a typical nonnoble, intellectual party. In the February Patent, Schmerling devised an electoral system that guaranteed a majority of German deputies in the Reichsrat, and the separation of Hungary was reduced to a minimum. All these aspects were agreeable to the Austro-Germans and met the liberals’ requirements in full. Interestingly, although the Patent did not even grant the most basic of civil rights and the government was still not accountable to the Parliament, the Austro-German liberals did not complain. They were fully aware that the Patent was only a kind of substitute for a real constitution, and not what they had striven to achieve. It was merely a concession that Emperor Francis Joseph, who felt threatened by even the thought of constitutionalism, was forced to make because of the military, foreign, and—especially—financial failures the empire was suffering. The subsequent fall of Schmerling also shows how weak and powerless the liberals were at the time. In 1863 Schmerling failed to achieve his goals at the meeting of the German princes in Frankfurt. His plans to establish a loose confederation of the German states under the leadership of Austria were aborted. He fell out of favor with the Emperor and lost his position. When Austria’s attempt to lead the German states failed, the liberal-constitutional disguise, whose only purpose was to make Austria more attractive to the German states, shriveled immediately. The Emperor suspended the February Patent, which, with all its defects, was important to the Verfassungspartei. At the same time, the operations of Parliament were also suspended. But even this blatantly absolutist measure did not provoke any response from the liberals. Although they were obviously not happy with the measures the Emperor was taking, their grumbles were not very loud. They regarded the events

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as unchangeable facts, and silently and politely waited for the Emperor to finish his negotiations with the Hungarian and the Croatian Diets, hoping that they would be the next to get concessions.7

V. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which established a dual monarchy in which Hungary was to enjoy constitutional independence within her historic borders, had a clear message for the Austro-German Constitution Party. They had to give up their ambition for central control of the empire. At the same time, the Austrian liberals had to realize that without the help of the dynasty they were completely powerless and unable to realize their ideals. By way of compensation, the Austrians were given a new constitution at the end of 1867, which renewed the electoral system of the February Patent. This time the statute included an amendment listing all civil rights. According to the new constitution the Austrian government (ruling in the Cis-Leithan territory) was accountable to the Parliament. Strangely enough, the same regulation did not apply to the joint ministers: they were not responsible to the Parliament. For the time being, the Austro-German liberals were happy to gain a leading political role in the whole territory of the empire, excluding Hungary, and did not complain. After the Austrian ratification of the Ausgleich in December 1867, and up until 1879—with the exception of 1871—the majority of the members of the Cis-Leithan government came from the Verfassungspartei. Nevertheless, the post of Prime Minister was usually filled by one of the Auersperg princes, who belonged to a group of aristocrats who represented constitutionality within the government. In Austria, even in the second half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie were totally excluded from political power. It was unusual for them to have representatives in the Parliament, especially in leading positions. Indeed it would have been completely exceptional in Austria for ministers to have had bourgeois roots. However, in 1869–70 a government was formed which was the first— and, for a long time, only—one in the Dual Monarchy whose ministers were all of bourgeois origin. It was such an exceptional phenomenon that the government was called the Bürgerministerium. Within a relatively short period, between 1867 and 1879, when the Verfassungspartei had a majority in both Parliament and government, many new laws were adopted in Austria, most of which were aimed at

7

See Kolmer, 1901; Charmatz, 1907; Benedikt, 1978; Böhm-Bawerk, 1890; Brusatti, 1973, vol. I. pp. 605–625, Zachar, 1981.

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boosting the development of capitalism. For example, the Parliament declared the separation of Church and State, and introduced a new, direct electoral system, a new civil code and criminal law were adopted, and a great number of measures were taken to regulate both commercial and industrial activities. Since the Emperor was indifferent or even benevolent in economic matters, it was relatively easy for the liberals to persuade others in the government to adopt their ideas. The activities of the Austrian and German liberals in the field of economics made this time one of the most successful in their history. The economic crisis in 1873 seriously damaged the developing Austrian economy. Hardly had the foundations of capitalist development been laid when the economy suffered a serious about-face. The economic crisis had negative consequences not only for the economy, but also for the mindset and ideology of the Austrian liberals, who had probably not been entirely convinced of the success of their economic reforms even before the crisis. They were in fact quite pessimistic about the implementation of classical liberal economic principles in Austria, and the crisis completely crushed their self-confidence. They lost their faith in the objective, omnipotent force of economic laws, and had serious doubts about the self-regulating ability of the market. As a result, they turned their attention to marginal utility theory, which was based more on subjective appreciation and individual values than on objective laws. Marginal utility theory concentrated on the individual and his or her personal and subjective needs. This is a clear indication that the Austrian liberals had set out on the road of individualism, which later became so typical of the Austrian bourgeoisie as a whole. When the bourgeois middle classes realized that they had been excluded from political power, they became more active in the private sphere and turned their attention to economic or cultural activities (although not always as active participants, sometimes only as an consumers).

VI. Political power had never been entirely accessible to the Austrian liberals, but in 1878–79 they were completely excluded from it. Their exclusion from power and the change of government did not happen overnight; rather their opponents pushed them back step by step. When Austria–Hungary occupied Bosnia, the representatives of the Verfassungspartei expressed their disapproval. Francis Joseph was enraged by such exceptional impertinence. Disobedience was not the only reason for his indignation. This had been his first success after a long period of diplomatic and military failures from 1854 to 1871. After a year of fierce struggle he succeeded in causing friction within the Constitution

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Party. Finally, by 1879, even the right-wing of the party had been excluded from the government. That was the beginning of a long period of conservative rule under the leadership of Taaffe. Over the next fourteen years, successive governments found help and support among the (especially Slav and German) clerical representatives. The year 1878– 79 clearly proved that the liberals were allowed to stay in power as long as they were ready to obey. As soon as they opposed the Emperor or did not behave according to the rules of ‘K. K. Hofliberalismus,’ they fell out of favor and had to leave the political stage in haste.8 In 1873 Austrian liberalism started to disintegrate in both an organizational and a spiritual sense. From 1879 the process of regression strengthened, and decay started to take hold. From this time on, there were two characteristic factions within the party, the Old and the New Liberals. The former stuck to the traditional, basic values of liberalism and wanted to keep the empire; the latter was more flexible concerning the classical principles of liberalism and more open to the modern, dynamic (and aggressive) theories developing at the turn of the century. This group, instead of cherishing the idea of a large Habsburg Empire, increasingly emphasized their German identity. The Old Liberals were losing more and more ground, their influence basically restricted to the older generation. Support for these factions also had a geographical element: while the Old Liberals typically came from the vicinity of Vienna and the central areas, the New or Young Liberals were mainly recruited from Bohemia and Styria, where the national issue was a ‘hot potato’ because of the patriotic rivalry between the Germans and the Slavs. The New Liberals followed an increasingly chauvinist policy, emphasizing German national superiority rather than universal liberal values. The Linz Program of 1882 clearly reflected this shift in their attitude. Although in its introduction the authors still stressed the classical values of liberalism, the program itself gave more scope to nationalist ideas and to the problem of how to guarantee German supremacy in the area. To achieve this, they were ready to compromise and give up sustaining their presence in Galicia, Bukovina and Dalmatia. In the remaining areas (formerly belonging to the German Confederation), the German character of the Austrian state could be ensured (that is why they wished to terminate the dualistic monarchy and enter into personal union with Hungary). After Linz the voice of liberalism was less and less easy to hear beneath the thundering slogans of the German-national trend.9

8 9

See Molisch, 1928; Molish, 1931; and Fuchs, 1949, pp. 165–196. See Molisch, 1928; and Preradovich, 1962.

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VII. A fundamental trait of Austrian liberalism was that it was unable to develop in a democratic way and so could not attain a wider audience and a more popular foundation. The German petty bourgeoisie and peasantry, who could have formed the basis of a large modern political party in Austria, moved in a different direction. Their organizations did not lack democratic values entirely, but unfortunately they were not their most characteristic feature. The German nationalists followed quite an aggressive and intolerant policy, which basically excluded the possibility of democratic development. Although the pragmatic policy of the Christian Social Party realized some liberal dreams and ideas (for example, they achieved important results in urban policy), conservatism and the material influence of the Church significantly hampered democratic development.10 Paradoxically, the most precious and authentic liberal values, like those established in other areas of Central and Eastern Europe, found supporters within the workers’ movement, in the Social Democratic Party. The best description of liberalism in Austria at the turn of the century, notwithstanding the fact that it took the form of a vitriolic caricature, was provided by Gumplowicz. His criticism was full of exaggerations, but his description was correct: “This is the party which was the right hand of Schmerling and called itself the Left (in the 1860s). This is the party which (in the 1870s), after 1873, when it abandoned the constitution the liberals had created in 1867, called itself loyal to the constitution. This is the party which, after falling apart and being torn into umpteen little factions, competing and arguing with each other, called itself the United left-wing (in the 1880s). This is the party which supported and assisted the reactionary capitalist forces (in the 1890s) and called itself progressive.” 11 By the turn of the century, liberalism as an ideological–political trend had lost all influence in Austria, and its fortunes have never revived, which clearly shows how closely it was connected to the Habsburg Empire. Liberalism in Austria was actually an attempt to merge German and Austrian identities, or at least to find common ground on which the two could co-exist. When this attempt proved a fiasco and ended in failure, liberalism as such ceased to exist and new trends emerged to take its place. The two main bourgeois ideologies that became prevalent after the death of liberalism were divided on the future of the Habsburg Empire: while the German nationalists emphasized the importance of

10 11

See Czeike, 1962. See Gumplowicz, 1907, p. 72.

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German supremacy, the Christian Social Party sought to maintain the empire and a kind of Austrian imperial identity. The general, non-national, universal political values of liberalism could never develop firm roots in the multi-national empire. Although the Social Democrats made some steps in this direction, their efforts to put their thought into practice always proved futile. Archduke Rudolph and his closest circle made an attempt to revive the idea of a Greater Austria and a liberal–centralist trend, but this phase was extremely short-lived.12 Finally, Austrian liberalism became the victim of German nationalism. As soon as the problem of German identity—in other words, the national issue—became the ultimate question, the liberals’ identity crisis became of less concern and liberalism itself started to disappear. During the first Austrian Republic, when the problem of identity was a serious and insoluble issue, liberalism was also out of the question. It was the Social Democrats again who stood for liberal and democratic values, this time in a physical sense and, where necessary, with the use of weapons. Liberalism never rose again in Austria, not even after the Second World War. During the 1890s there was an attempt to revive some liberal values within the Liberty Party, but after a relatively brief period the nationalistic German right-wing took power within the party and the liberals’ hopes were crushed again. A point worthy of note is that this German ‘attack’ started from Carinthia, where the Germans lived together with the Slovenian minority. This was not the first time in the history of the Habsburg Empire that Carinthia had been a hotbed of nationalism. The German-speaking populations of Carinthia, Styria, and Bohemia had nurtured strong nationalistic feelings ever since the revival of the national movements and national clashes in the nineteenth century. It was the situation of the German minority in Bohemia that was especially prone to trigger nationalistic feelings in the Germans. Indeed, sometimes it would reach the level of hysteria. This highly emotional attitude often led to misdirected, sometimes even tragic decisions: in 1871, for example, with the failure of the Czech compromise, in 1897, with the failure of the law that would have granted equality to the native languages in the area, and in 1938 in Munich. It is a strange twist in the historical tale of liberalism that the renaissance of liberalism and the ideas of neo-liberalism in many ways originated from an Austrian philosopher, Hayek. But in this area the old saying is especially true: no one can be a prophet in his own country.

12

See Hamann, 1978; and Kann, 1964, vol. II, pp. 181–187.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ableitinger, Alfred. 1968. Liberalismus—Nationalismus—Nationale Strömungen. Retzhof: Leibnitz. Allmayer-Beck, Johann Christoph. 1957 ed. Otto Schulmeister. ‘Die Träger der staatlichen Macht.’ in Spectrum Austriae. Vienna: Herder. Andrian-Werburg, Viktor. 1847. Österreich und unsere Zukunft. Hamburg: Hoffmann. Benedikt, Heinrich. 1978. Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der franzisko-josephinischen Zeit. Munich: Herold. Bibl, Viktor. 1911. Die niederösterreichischen Stände im Vormärz. Vienna: Gerlach. ———. 1922. Von Revolution zu Revolution. Vienna: Rikola. Bleiber, Helmut. 1975. ‘Zur Entwicklung der antifeudalen Oppositionsbewegung in Österreich vor der Revolution 1848–49.’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1. n. p. Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen. 1972. The Austrian School. Annals of American Academy of Political Science, vol. I. (1890–91) Brooklyn. Brusatti, Alois. 1973. Die Entwicklung der Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, Bd. 1. Ed. Adam Wandruszka, Peter Urbanitsch. Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichishen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Cahnman, Werner J. 1959. Adolf Fischhof and His Jewish Followers.Yearbook of the Leo Beck Institute. London. Charmatz, Richard. 1907. Deutsch-österreichische Politik, Studien über den Liberalismus und die auswärtige Politik Österreichs. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1910. Adolf Fischhof. Stuttgart-Berlin: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger. ———. 1917. Das politische Denken in Österreich. Vienna: Verlag des Volksbidungshauses Wiener Urania. ———. 1920. Minister Freiherr von Bruck, der Vorkämpfer Mitteleuropas. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. ———. 1947. Der Wegbereiter der Reaktion, Lebensbilder der Geschichte Österreichs. Vienna: Danubia. Czeike, Felix. 1962. Liberale, christlichsoziale und sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik in Wien (1861–1934). Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. Eder, Karl. 1955. Der Liberalismus in Altösterreich, Geschichte, Politik, Kultur. Vienna-Munich: Herold. Fellner, Fritz. 1955. Der Februarpatent von 1861. Mitteilungen des Institutes für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. n. p. Fischhof, Adolf. 1866. Ein Blick auf Österreichs Lage. Vienna: Blemm. ———. 1868. Zur Erweiterung der Munizipalautonomie. Vienna: Wallishausen. Franz, Georg. 1955. Liberalismus. Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der HabsburgerMonarchie. Munich: G. D. W. Callwey. Friedjung, Heinrich. 1902. Harc a német hegemóniáért. Budapest: MTA. Originally published as Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Deutschland, 1859 bis 1866. Stuttgart, Berlin: J. G. Cotta. ———. 1908. Österreich von 1848 bis 1860. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta. ———. 1929. Alexanders Bachs Jugend und Bildungsjahre. Historische Aufsätze. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta.

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Fuchs, Albert. 1949. Geistige Strömungen in Österreich, 1867–1918. Vienna: Globus-Verlag. Geist-Lányi, Paula. 1920. Das Nationalitätenproblem auf dem Reichstag zu Kremsier. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Gumplowicz, Ludwig. 1907. Österreichisches Staatsrecht. Vienna: Manz. Hamann, Brigitte. 1978. Kronprinz Rudolf, Der Weg nach Mayerling. ViennaMunich: Amalthea. Hantsch, Hugo. 1962. Gestalter der Geschichte Österreichs. Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag. Hroch, Miroslav. 1968. Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Völkern Europas. Prague: Charles University. Irinyi, Károly. 1973. Mitteleuropa-tervek és az osztrák-magyar politikai közgondolkozás. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Johnston, William M. 1974. Österreichische Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. GrazVienna-Cologne: Böhlau. Kann, Robert A. 1962. “Kanzel und Katheder”. Studien zur österreichischen Geistesgeschichte. Vienna: Herder. ———. 1964. Das Nationalitätenproblem im Habsburgerreich. Graz–Vienna– Cologne: Böhlau. Kohn, Hans. 1944. The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1955. Nationalism. Its Meaning and History. Princeton: Van Nostrand. ———. 1961. The Habsburg Empire 1804–1918. Princeton-New York-London: Van Nostrand. Kolmer, Gustav. 1901. Parlament und Verfassung in Österreich, Vols. I–IV. Vienna: C. Fromme. Lengyel, Márta S. 1969. Reformersors Metternich Ausztriájában [Reformers’ fate in Metternich’s Austria]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Lukács, György. 1965. Az ész trónfosztása [The Dethronement of Reason], chapter I. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Lutz, Heinrich. 1973. Von Königgrätz zum Zweibund. Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 271. Vienna–Munich. Molisch, Paul. 1928. Geschichte der deutschnationalen Bewegung in Österreich von ihren Anfängen bis zum Zerfall der Monarchie. Jena: Fischer. ———. 1931. Briefe zur deutschen Politik in Österreich. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller. ———. 1944. Anton von Schmerling und der Liberalismus in Österreich. Archiv für österreichische Geschichte, 116. Plener, Ernst. 1911. Erinnerungen, Vol. I. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Preradovich, Nikolaus. 1955. Die Führungsschichten in Österreich und Deutschland 1804–1918. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner. ———. 1962. Der nationale Gedanke in Österreich, 1866–1938. Göttingen: Musterschmidt. Rath, J. 1955. ‘The Viennese Liberals of 1848,’ Journal of Central European Affairs. Redlich, Josef. 1920. Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem. Leipzig: P. Reinhold. ———. 1925–26. Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem. Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag-Reinhold. Schiller, Friedrich. n. d. Cabal and Love. n. p.

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Somogyi, Éva. 1976. A birodalmi centralizmustól a dualizmusig [From imperial centralism to dualism]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Szekfû, Jules. 1945. État et nation. Paris: PUF. Tezner, Friedrich. 1901. Technik und Geist des ständisch-monarchischen Ständestaats. Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot. Valjavec, Fritz. 1945. Der Josephinismus. Vienna: Verlag für Geshichte und Politik. Winter, Eduard. 1941. Der Josephinismus und seine Geschichte. Brünn: R. M. Rohrer. ———. 1968. Frühliberalismus in der Donaumonarchie, Religiöse, nationale und wissenschaftliche Strömungen von 1790–1848. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Zachar, József. 1981. Az osztrák-német Alkotmánypárt és a politikai hatalom. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives before 1848 IVÁN ZOLTÁN DÉNES

I. The rivalries between liberals and conservatives in Hungary are almost two hundred years old. Their ancestors, the anti-Habsburg and the pro-Habsburg (“kuruc,” crucitürks, Christians fighting with the Turks vs. “labanc,” long-wigged people, supporters of the Habsburgs) groups facing each other go back to the late seventeenth century. Of course, the differences between the kurucs and the liberals on one hand, and the labancs and the conservatives on the other were important, but ideologues and journalists have created myths on them, including their unilinear continuity throughout the centuries as the Whig and Tory interpretations of British history. The pro-government, anti-opposition Conservative Party of the Hungarian conservatives was set up in 1846, and the Opposition Party rallying the Hungarian liberals followed suit in 1847. The predecessors of the conservatives were the pro-Habsburg/Viennese aulic party. The forerunners of the liberals included the philantropist patriots of the enlightened and post-enlightened absolutist periods and the platform of the traditional anti-Viennese opposition which blamed the Viennese decision-makers for permanently breaching constitutionalism, the gravaminalists. Actually, the reason the Opposition Party took so long to evolve, from the 1820s to 1847, was because beneath the appearance of continuity with the gravaminalists, it represented an utterly new liberal message. After the precedents in the 1780s–90s, condition assessments and programs were put forth in the 1820s–30s and the liberals came to be organized as a political force in the county assemblies and the diet. The highly varied camp of the Hungarian liberals comprised the majority of the opposition in the lower house and exerted growing influence on the shaping of the political mentality of the public strengthened in the early 1840s and coalesced into a party in 1847. Their goals were determined by the liberal nationalist concept of assimilation through extending the political rights, which was then enacted in 1848. The legislation provided for the liberation of serfs, equality before the law, equitable share of taxes, popular sovereignty (via the parliament based on popular repre-

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sentation and the government responsible to it) and the separation of legislative, executive and judiciary powers. The greatest nineteenth-century achievement of Hungarian liberal nationalism is the vital legacy on which the democratic parliamentary system that was attempted in Hungary in 1918 is based. This legacy is also present after the 1989 change, despite all the political histeria, and so is the democratic national identity at present. The majority of the nobility, however, were characterized by conservativism from the 1790s to the emergence of the liberals in the 1820s– 30s. The gravaminalist opposition adopted the policy of protecting their privileges, disguised as the safeguarding of the constitutionalism, while the aulic party promoted government support identified with loyalty to the sovereign. In the 1840s the government started an offensive for a pro-government majority in the lower house. In order to oust the liberals from the diet and the county assemblies, and in support of the conservative politicians, they founded a new party on 12 November 1846 to rally the senior officials of the government organs and the counties. The conservative offensive unfolding in waves between 1843 and 1847 was not at all unsuccessful, yet in spring 1848 the conservatives were squeezed out of the Hungarian political life. They could only return after the crushing defeat of the Hungarian defensive war and then played an important role in preparing the 1867 Compromise. More important still was their legend that emerged in the 1870s, strengthened in the early twentieth century, which revived and spread in the name of antiliberalism in the interwar period and has still a great weight in the current Hungarian collective memory and self-image. Along the spectrum of European liberalism and conservativism, those who represented the community of a free property-owning middle class or the aristocracy within an independent constitutional state had a different place from those who lived under foreign domination, often within an absolutistic empire. In the latter case, liberals fought for the emancipation of society from the state and for an independent constitutional state of their own at the same time. The conservatives, on the other hand, had not much to conserve in the area of political life in such a society. The liberal nationalist ideological program and the national conservative role were similar in the (to some degree known but as yet uncompared) roles of the countries which had similar situations to Norway, Ireland, Germany and Poland to Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Prior to 1848, the society of Hungary was divided into the privileged and the non-privileged on the basis of the divine order the system of privileges, selection by birth and the inequality of human qualities. The two worlds were not equalized or linked to a strengthening middle class. Though the two worlds were not inaccessible to each other, and an individual rising from the unprivileged was not unheard

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 157 of, and, the community of the Estates was more varied than concepts can suggest, the privileged (primarily on account of their exemption from tax on landed property and the right to participate in politics) were separated from the “misera plebs contribuens.” Among the politically active strata, two opposite conceptions about social organization were in conflict: the program of extending the nobility’s equality before the law to the unprivileged on the one hand, and the concept of conserving and reviving the privileges aimed at solving social differences within the nobility by depriving the impoverished noblemen of their political right’s and increasing the rights of well-to-do noblemen on the other. In the following, I am going to reconstruct and compare the intellectual horizon and value system of Hungarian liberals and conservatives up to 1848. I juxtapose their concepts of society (II), their views of the state, including the relationship of the Hungarian state with the Habsburg empire (III), their interpretation of the nation, the self and the enemy (IV), their image of the outside world and the European balance of power (V), before I draw conclusions, define their interpretation of political freedom, personal liberty and their concept of the political community, the nation (VI) and look at their subsequent impact (VII).

II. The Hungarian liberals’ anti-absolutist, pro-constitutionalism, proprogress and pro-nation positions in the 1820s, 30s and 40s had notable antecedents in Hungary. In order to understand these views one has to realize the dilemma they faced in which decisions had to be taken. That was what anyone faced with who wished to change the general situation in Hungary in which the population lived in backwardness, the minority within an aristocratic political framework, the majority wholly excluded, and all submitted to the absolutistic decisions of imperial policy-makers. Back in the 1780s most of them who chose progress instead of backwardness still had reason to believe that progress was represented and promoted by the enlightened absolutist Viennese government, the center of the empire, by the monarch and his advisers, despite and in opposition to the privileged in the aristocratic institutions in Hungary. Many of those, on the other side, who protected the national language, national traditions, the culture, identity and constitutionalism of the nation against the Germanizing and civilizing policies of the empire easily shifted into the position of defending the world of privilege and backwardness. How was it possible to break out of this vicious circle? From the roles of philanthropist and patriot, from the catchwords of civilization, progress and motherland, several Josephinist intellectuals,

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including József Hajnóczy and Gergely Berzeviczy, first opted for the needs of civilization and progress as opposed to national affinities, identifying national tradition with backwardness. By contrast, many advocates of loyalty to the national tradition and the motherland rejected the civilizing and Germanizing innovations of enlightened absolutism as being safeguards of privilege. At the same time, there were progressives, such as Ferenc Kazinczy who were working for Joseph II and yet were very much for the promotion of Hungarian language and literature. Like the eighteenth century Polish reformers of noble rank, the patriot friends of progress, József Hajnóczy and Gergely Berzeviczy quickly realized that the best protection of constitutionalism against the absolutist peril was the extension of constitutionalism.1 In 1790, Hajnóczy wrote: “The day-dreamer may posit two hypotheses: The estates regard their own legislation, autonomy, immunity from German influence as the uppermost limit to political freedom so much so that despite having a common ruler with the rest of the German provinces, they wish to determine all the topics of legislation similarly to Ireland... only acknowledging the king’s right of consent in legislation, while his executive power is not recognized fully unless through legal persons. As much as humanely possible, the present-day constitution will survive in Hungary. The author thinks that the only way to achieve this is to have the greatest part of the nation—those disposing over physical and moral forces—acquire advantage in legislation. Who are they? All non-nobles, especially town-dwelling citizens, peasants, soldiers, the lower clergy of all the Christian denominations in Hungary and Transylvania, be they Catholic, Greek catholic, Greek orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist or Unitarian.”2 This same recognition and program was arrived at three decades later by the liberal participants in the county disputes over the operata systematica (reports of the situation of the country).

1. In the early 1830s, Miklós Wesselényi reinterpreted the constitution of the Estates (Stände) and its institutions. For strategic considerations in laying the foundation for reforms, he wanted to persuade his noble

1

Hajnóczy, 1958, pp. 29–46; Hajnóczy, 1998, pp. 35–153; Berzeviczy Gergely magyar alkotmányterve, 1933; pp. 16–40, 182–200. Cf. Benda, 1978, pp. 105–212; H. Balázs, 1967; Idem, 1987, pp. 280–329; Poór, 1988, pp. 162–169. 2 Hajnóczy, 1958, p. 29.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 159 audience to undertake them. This and his conviction that constitutionalism and civil rights could be extended made him depict the existing constitution as an institution that was founded on a narrow basis because of the neglect, egoism and narrow-mindedness of those entitled to take part in politics then and now, but also as an institution whose essence allowed for the renewal of its foundations and the extension of its boundaries.3 This program was joined by the poet and thinker Ferenc Kölcsey, and by Ferenc Deák and Lajos Kossuth, who further elaborated and reinterpreted it. Now there was an answer to the dilemma of progress vs. independence, European civilization, modernization vs. identity. Wesselényi’s conception was worded by Ferenc Kölcsey in his dietal diary as follows: “By the interest of the people... we understand at least three different interests that we are still unable, and unwilling, to reconcile and unite: the interests of the nobility, the burghers and the peasantry. The first is fighting against the court for constitutional power and pushing back the second, while exercising patronage over the third, it keeps it subjugated. The second interest as it is formulated today is not a real interest, for only the interests of the oligarchy of the towns are alive and vocal, the interests of the middle class are taciturn and trodden down. And as long as they are silent, the former bow their heads to the court and keep wrangling with the nobility. The third has never been expressed in its entirety and it is still hard to give it expression. And until the first accepts it as an equal comrade at arms instead of exercising disdainful patronage, the court has the possibility to stage a scene of defending the third against the first. And this scene has indeed been on since Ferdinand I; the disappointment this has caused made several prominent philanthropists of the nobility conceive of the municipal interests of the nobility in the wrong way, and instead of uniting it with the interest of the peasantry within the shortest possible time, they are inclined toward the court, thus wishing to protect the oppressed. Protected they may be in this way, but elevated: never.” 4 The extension of individual and political rights to the non-nobles to be initiated by the nobility was based on the political system of aristocratic self-government. The liberties were to be extended to the peasantry and the middle class to make them interested in protecting the system of political self-government, of constitutionalism against absolutism. The protection of constitutionalism was therefore conditional on its extension.

3 4

Trócsányi, 1965; Barta, 1966. Kölcsey, 1960, 2. pp. 1266–1267.

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In his reports as delegate of Zala county delivered to the diet in 1840, Ferenc Deák defined the all-inclusive extension of liberty and property as the motors of the “harmonization of interests”: “Diligence has two powerful motors: freedom and property. Two forces lend energy and enthusiasm to the citizen to defend his country: liberty and property. These two forces alone can surely tie the people to the country and to law, and these magic powers are liberty and property.... In the old times, our forebears knew but one holy duty towards their country amidst the incessant bloody fightings: to defend the goods and the independence of the country even if their blood was to be shed. In our time, this sacred duty is paired with another one: to unfold the slumbering potential of the nation, to give new life to diligence, and amidst the blessings of peace bought at the cost of so much blood to promote the country, which had been won and preserved by the blood of our ancestors for us, to prosperity.” 5 The “free property owners” are the free citizens of a free state, their freedom is personal liberty and political freedom; the phrase designates the disentanglement from feudal bondage. The sharing of individual freedom with others—as a potentiality of the constitution, of political freedom, of the nation—has political implications. Nearly all the Hungarian liberal reformists of the 1830s and 40s—including Wesselényi, Kölcsey, Deák, Batthyány and Kossuth— addressed the opponents of absolutism, the members of the opposition, wishing to convince them that they had to take over the initiative from absolutism. They followed in the footsteps of the earlier opposition in that they were antagonistic to the pro-Habsburg party, while they also differed insomuch as they grasped the initiative themselves instead of merely rejecting the initiatives of the aulic side. They were the more inspired to do so as the measures of the government were not aimed at eliminating backwardness or modernizing the system of aristocratic institutions, not to mention the rejection of absolutism itself. They had good reason to do so, as the Viennese government was essentially absolutistic in nature, via aristocratic mediation, and despite the curbing effect of the system of aristocratic institutions that moderated and sometimes obstructed the will of the government. It was an absolutistic government that was not restricted by any aristocratic political self-government or aristocratic constitution in any other land of the Empire. That is why the backward, anachronistic, institutional system of Hungary was adduced by the Tyrolean politician Victor von Andrian-Werburg as a political model to be upheld in the fight of the Hereditary Lands for

5

Deák, 1903, 1. pp. 443, 466–468. See also: pp. 218–260.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 161 the renewal of their political structure, as a counterweight to absolutism.6 The extension of individual and political rights to the non-nobles came into legal force in the spring of 1848. As a result, in 1848–49 the serfs did not turn against their landlords (during the war with the Austrian troops) as happened in the noblemen’s uprising in the Krakow Republic, Galicia in 1846, but the former serfs and their former lords joined forces to fight against the intruding nationalities and the regular Habsburg army, and later against Russian intervention.

6

The reconstruction of Kossuth’s variant of interest harmonization is based on the following writings: (Lajos Kossuth:) “Polémia,” Pesti Hírlap, 16 October 1841; Idem: “Viszonozás.” [In return] Pesti Hírlap, 13, 17 November 1841; Idem: “Választási rendszer a városokban” [Electoral system in the towns] Pesti Hírlap, 24 November 1841; Idem: “Birtokarisztokrácia. Példa külföldrôl”. [Landed aristocracy. Foreign examples] Pesti Hírlap, 1, 8 December 1841; Idem: “Megyei hatóságkör.” [County jurisdiction] Pesti Hírlap, 6 January 1842; Idem: “Megyei szerkezet.” [County structure] Pesti Hírlap, 9 January 1842; Pulszky, 1842; (Lajos Kossuth:) “Adalék a centralizációróli fejtegetésekhez.” [Addenda to the discussion about centralization] Pesti Hírlap, 20 February 1842; Idem: “Eszmetársulat”. [Association of ideas] Pesti Hírlap, 31 March 1842; Idem: “Nehézségek.” [Difficulties] Pesti Hírlap, 17 April 1842; Idem: “Ismét és ismét adó.” [Tax again and again] Pesti Hírlap, 24 April 1842; Idem: “Városi belszerkezet.” [Autonomy of the town] Pesti Hírlap, 17 July 1842; Idem: “Még egy szó a sz/abad/ k/irályi/ városokról.” [One more word about free royal towns] Pesti Hírlap, 31 July 1842; Idem: “Még egy-két ok.” [Another reason or two] Pesti Hírlap, 4 August 1842; Idem: “Egy új lépés a városok ügyében”. [A new step for the towns] Pesti Hírlap, 9 October; Idem: “Ismét egy lépés a városok ügyében.” [A new step for the towns] Pesti Hírlap, 9 February 1843; Idem: “K/irályi/ városi szavazatarány.” [Rate of votes in royal towns] Pesti Hírlap, 26 February, 2 March 1843; Idem: “Városi polgárjog és honoráciorok.” [Civil rights in towns and the intellectuals] Pesti Hírlap, 26 March 1843; Idem: “Polgárkategóriák”. [Categories of citizens] Pesti Hírlap, 30 March 1843; Idem: “Két ellenvélemény.” [Two contrary opinions] Pesti Hírlap, 6 April 1843; Idem: “Cenzus” [Census] Pesti Hírlap, 9 April 1843; Idem: “Városi követek az országgyûlésen.” [Delegates of towns in the diet] Pesti Hírlap, 11 May 1843; Idem: “Zala s az adó.” [Zala and the tax] Pesti Hírlap, 13 April 1843; Idem: “A pillanat kénytelensége.” [The compulsion of the moment] Pesti Hírlap, 20 April 1843; Idem: “A kérdések legkényesbike.” [The most delicate question] Pesti Hírlap, 13 June, 20, 23 July 1843; Idem: “Adalék a teendôk többi részéhez.” [Addenda to the rest of the tasks] Pesti Hírlap, 27 July 1843; Idem: “A megyék.” [The counties] Pesti Hírlap, 9 November 1843; Idem: “Kiábrándulás.” [Disappointment] Pesti Hírlap, 7 December 1843. See also: Andrian-Werburg, 1843, 1847. Cf. Redlich, 1920–1926, 1/1. pp. 59–88, esp. 77, 1/2. pp. 20–22, Jászi, 1971; Kosáry, 2001, pp. 432, 536.

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That the nationalities took up arms against the Hungarian government despite having been granted civil rights was attributable, among many factors, to the fact that under assimilation through the extension of individual and political rights, to use the historian János Varga’s phrase, the Hungarian liberals envisioned a political nation and—similar to most parts of Europe—they did not even think of granting collective rights to them. The interest harmonization program of the Hungarian liberals fitted in with the liberal nationalist interpretations of liberty and nation in the rest of Europe.7 What Wesselényi, Deák and Kossuth revived was far from the policy of safeguarding privileges in the disguise of grievances: it was the radical reinterpretation of the aristocratic constitutionalism against absolutism and the privilege system and in favor of modernization. Wesselényi’s aristocratic liberalism and Kossuth’s democratically open liberalism were authentic and served to ground, elaborate and implement the program of reforms. The program of extending constitutional rights took two directions during the course of its implementation. On the one hand, it was the set of needs for the civilization and for the cultivation of the privileged and non-privileged inhabitants of Hungary (and Transylvania), the normative formulation of the external and internal preconditions for humane existence. On the other hand, it was a plan to improve and gradually transform aristocratic constitutionalism in opposition to absolutism. The reformer magnate István Széchenyi’s books of the 1830s outline the requirements of civilization. His own program of economic and social progress was subordinated to the imperative of preserving the originality of the Magyars in the 1840s Miklós Wesselényi’s Balítéletekrôl [On Prejudices] and Kölcsey’s writings, however, not only contrast critical assessment of conditions with desirable civilizatory improvements, but also contain a discussion of absolutism vs. constitutionalism. Széchenyi defined his position in opposition to the traditional antiViennese opposition, while separating it far less distinctly from the other pole of the traditional political scene, the aulic party. Although, as regards the decisive liberalist opposition of absolutism vs. constitutionalism, he did not identify with the pro-Vienna side, he drew the main outlines of his self-identity as against the gravaminalists. He did not address his perfectionist demands and dominant utilitarian arguments to the existing nobility in need of reformation, but addressed his civilizatory program (except in Stádium [Phase]) to a still non-existent pub-

7

On liberal nationalism: Varga, 1993; Tamir, 1993; Dénes, 1993. On the question of collective rights, see: Kis, 1997, pp. 129–184.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 163 lic and to isolated individuals, disregarding the existence and influence of absolutism.8 The two concepts of “unifying the different interests” were fused by the mainstream of Hungarian liberalism: Wesselényi, Kölcsey, Deák and Kossuth. They established cross-references between the imperative needs of civilization on the one hand, and measures against absolutism on the other. They reinterpreted the foundation of the privilege system, of aristocratic constitutionalism as the basic structure of the collective of free property owners, and replaced selection by birth, the system of privileges with the principle of individual achievement as the organizer of society amidst the externalities of constitutional protection. They wanted more than just to get the privileged to extend rights to a wider circle of people; they wished to abolish the privilege system, to replace it with the world of liberty.

2. Their adversaries, the Hungarian conservatives, accused them of subverting the social order and of annihilating constitutionalism, and at the beginning they parried the liberal challenge in the name of defending the ancient constitution. They thought—quite rightly—that the liberal proposals were incompatible with the essence of aristocratic constitutionalism, representing a fundamental change, a different principle of societal organization from that of the status quo. They claimed that the liberals were subverters of the constitution, of property relations, [radicals who went beyond constitutional politics] and therefore had to be expelled from it. Hierarchical stratification, they claimed, was impossible to do away with, for human nature—its beastly instincts derived from original sin—had to be bridled and not unleashed.9

8

Széchenyi, 1830, 1831; Idem, 1833; Idem, 1841; Wesselényi, 1833; Széchenyi, 1927, 1930, I. pp. 33–196, 280–286, 292–297, 303–320, 337–386, 389–402, 430–458, 479–513, 535–551, 561–595, 599–661, 716–743, 786–810; Kölcsey, 1960, 2. pp. 7–169, 343–629. Cf. Trócsányi, 1965; Barta, 1966; Barany, 1968; Gergely, 1972; Szabad, 1977; Varga, 1982, 1993; Varga, 1983. 9 Dessewffy, 1887, pp. 39–40, 46–52, 68–72, Gróf János Majláth: “Gr. Dessewffy Aurél – vágtatási és konzervatív elvek gyökérkülönbsége.” [Radical differences between the principles of progressives and conservatives] Nemzeti Újság, 8 February 1843; X. U.: “Az aranybulla s ellene forralt demokratai küzdelmek.” [The Golden Bull, and the democratic struggles plotted against it] Nemzeti Újság, 3 May 1843, (Sándor Lipthay:) “Politikai stabilitás elve.” [The principle of political stability] 3 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 14 February, 11, 13 March 1845; Dénes, 1989, pp. 28–75.

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The Hungarian conservatives derived the extendable jurisdiction of the government from the personal power of the monarch, urging a “conservative reform” that would leave the government, and the bases of social and political organization, untouched. They mobilized their followers to support the government and push back the liberal reformist opposition. They claimed that the stock of competent politicians should be recruited from the imperial government, the officials of the Hungarian governing organs, the aristocracy and the upper layer of the Catholic clergy, as well as the landowning nobility, all others being unwarrantable rebels.10 What gave impetus to their stance was the increasingly sharp criticism leveled by Széchenyi within the liberal camp at the reformists dissenting from his position, especially Lajos Kossuth, but essentially the whole Hungarian liberal élite, in no little measure because of the unfeasibility and aristocratic liberalism of the program put forth in Stádium.11 The Hungarian conservatives put social rank and official loyalty above independent existence guaranteed by property. In their thinking, the need for social rise was substituted by individual rise, and the priorities became the creation of effective order, the consolidation of the authority of the state, and the protection and modernization of the system of privileges. Instead of important reforms, the Hungarian conservatives initiated the rejection of the liberal proposals and the suppression of the reformist opposition.Yet they did have innovations: the plan to disfranchise the poor nobility and the promotion of the rights of the large landowning nobility on the one hand, and, primarily, the technical modernization of the state to the direction of absolutism on the other. This was not conservation but innovation.12 At the core of the conservative concept was the rule of the state over society. The liberals aimed to see that nobody and nothing had power over society. They wanted to emancipate society from the state and from feudal hierarchy, so they projected a different principle of social organization into the past and into Hungarian constitutionalism, in the interest of the ultimate aim of laying the foundations for a society of free propertied citizens and a liberal constitutional monarchy. The conservatives were committed to the absolutist state and aristocratic societal organization. State meant the absolutism of the Austrian Empire and the—both fictitious and real—aristocratic constitutionalism of the 10

Dessewffy, 1887, pp. 24–48, 201–212; Andics, 1975, pp. 109–142; Varga, 1982, pp. 9–24; Allmayer-Beck, 1959; Kaltenbrunner, 1972, pp. 189–218; Dénes, 1989, pp. 28–75; Varga, 1993, pp. 109–146. 11 Varga, 1993; Varga, 1983, pp. 34–108, 147–153. 12 Dessewffy, 1887, pp. 218–226, 231–233, 269–276, 343–349; Dénes, 1989, pp. 48–53.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 165 Kingdom of Hungary. Different approaches to the system of privileges implied different interpretations of the relation between absolutism and constitutionalism.

III. The elite of the liberal reformist opposition learnt their lesson from the political lawsuits and distinguished the ruler’s person from that of his government, the king from his counsellors, following Wesselényi and the ancient commonplace of “good king, wicked advisers.” The sovereign is the personal symbol of the temporal continuity of the state; he does not exercise personal rule but fulfils a constitutional function. He reigns out of the collective wish of the nation based on the agreement between the ruler and the nation, and not by divine grace. He is sacred and invulnerable, above party struggles, and he does not interfere with them. Loyalty manifest and expected to him is loyalty to the Hungarian state, his legitimate rule is the symbol of complying with the wish of the nation.13

1. Wesselényi, Deák and Kossuth outlined a coherent system for constitutional state organization, including the conversion of a feudal constitutionalism into a liberal one, the exercise of autonomous statehood and the changing of the relationship with the Habsburg Empire from one based on absolutism, to one of constitutionalism. Against the repeated upsurge of the absolutist threat, they tried to renew the feudal institutions, starting with the county system. They wanted to mould the counties, so far the institutions defending the rights of the nobility, into forums of popular representation uniting the nobility, the burghers and the peasantry. They reinterpreted the aristocratic county system to reflect the role that it played in the past. In their interpretation, the county system was the ancient diet of military democracy. Kossuth proposed that it be the starting point of the autonomy of free property-owners, the renewed ground for selfgovernment. This interpretation fulfilled the same function that the “natural condition” played in social contract theories. It was a methodological starting point for the basis of legitimization, of which not only the historicizing form but the normative contents are worth noting. The 13

Wesselényi, 1833, pp. 155–162; Deák, 1903. 1. pp. 147–148, 258–260; Az 1843-dik esztendei pünkösd hava 14-dik napjára rendeltetett magyarországi közgyûlésnek irományai. 5. pp. 87–88; Kovács, 1894, 6. pp. 408–409, 485–489, 505–508; Ellenôr. Politicai zsebkönyv (1847) pp. 224–290; Kossuth, 1951, pp. 152–157, 168–196.

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county system would shift toward a system of self-government in which the villages would participate in the political affairs of the counties.14 The liberals demanded people’s representation in the county system. It was coupled with a contiguous and inseparable set of proposals that included the abolition of the landlord—serf relation, redistribution of power, and responsible government. These proposals were followed by demands for the introduction of jury-trial, general taxation, control of revenues, and parliamentary control over the utilization of the country’s economic resources. They argued that legislative, executive and juridical powers be separated. Legislation had to be the forum of national sovereignty, of the nation’s will, above all through the community of free property owners, based on the abolition of the landlord-serf relationship. They stressed that the elected body of the legislature, the lower house, had to have a larger weight than the upper house composed of those invited by the monarch. This was conditional on the lower house becoming an institution exercising sovereignty by representing free propertied citizens, which in turn required free property owners as citizens. Founding a legislature on the basis of popular representation via county and municipal self-government was conditional on the independence of jurisdiction and the government’s responsibility to the diet. Another precondition was that the government had to assert the will of the parliamentary majority instead of representing absolutistic and foreign interests. Whenever a government failed to represent the will of the nation as manifest in the parliamentary majority, it had to be dismissed. Parliamentary rotation of parties and the dismissability of the government were central to the liberals’ program.15 Opposing a government that aimed at power concentration was of more than theoretical importance because it emphasized the division of power and the responsibility of the government: since executive power was above the legislature, the upper house of the legislature was inter14

Kovács, 1894. 3. pp. 460, 472, 480; (Lajos Kossuth:) “Zala s az adó.” [Zala and the tax] Pesti Hírlap, 13 April 1843, (Idem:) “A pillanat kénytelensége.” [The compulsion of the moment] Pesti Hírlap, 20 April 1843; Gróf Károly Andrássy: “Az országlási modor egy új neme. I–II.” [A new manner of government] Pesti Hírlap, 27, 30 April 1843; Baron Miklós Wesselényi: “Nemzeti kórállapot.” [National diagnosis] I–VII. Pesti Hírlap, 15, 18, 22, 29 June, 2, 16 July 1843; (Lajos Kossuth:) “A kérdések legkényesbike.” [The most delicate question] I–III. Pesti Hírlap, 20, 23 July 1843; (Idem:) “Adalék a teendôk többi részéhez.” [Addenda to the rest of the tasks] Pesti Hírlap, 27 July 1843; (Idem:) “A megyék.” [The counties] Pesti Hírlap, 9 November 1843. Precedent: (Idem:) “Megyei hatóságkör.” [County jurisdiction] Pesti Hírlap, 6 January 1842; (Idem:) “Megyei szerkezet.” [County structure] Pesti Hírlap, 24 April 1842. See also: Kemény, 1843–1844; Eötvös, 1846, pp. 19–176. Cf. Varga, 1980–1981.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 167 twined with the government, and the judges were appointed and checked by the government. By now the steps taken to prepare the absolutistic revival of the anachronistic system of institutions under Metternich’s secret plan had been unfolded. The conservative offensive aimed to degrade county self-government to the rank of an executive body, to reduce legislative functions to administrative functions, and to curtail the freedom of speech and the press. The moulding of the aristocratic constitution into a modern constitution and the establishment of autonomous statehood are obvious in the propositions of the liberals, but their interpretation of the mutual relationship between the Austrian Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom are misunderstood or misinterpreted by historians and journalists alike. Distortion is still present, though many scholars have clarified the relationship between the imperial constitution and the Hungarian liberal constitution. The Hungarian liberals did not want to separate the country from the empire, but via structural reforms wanted to make it capable of protecting civilization and constitutionalism under the menace of an expanding Russian Empire. A prerequisite, as they saw it, was constitutional governance of the Trans-Leithan provinces and the liberal constitutional running of Hungarian statehood, which, in Wesselényi’s, Deák’s and Kossuth’s conception, was an important element in the European equilibrium. The Hungarian state was a nation-state, the realization of independent Hungarian statehood and the self-government of the strengthened and rejuvenated Magyars via the extension of civil rights, and this state was linked to the empire in a personal union. Looking at it from another angle, the political and economic alliance to be established with the western lands, based on constitutional foundations, was to tighten the partnership between the Austrian Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom.16

15

Kovács, 1894. 4. pp. 17–18, 20, 22, 24–27, 36, 6. pp. 184–195, 408–409, 485–489, 505–508; O.gy.-i irományok, 1843/1844. [Dietal documents] 5. 17, 71–72, 81, 87–88, Ellenôr pp. 224–290; Az 1847-ik esztendei Szent András hava 7-ik napjára rendeltetett magyarországi közgyûlésnek irományai. pp. 6–41, 43–44, 70–71, 77–78; Az 1847-ik esztendei Szent András hava 7-ik napjára rendeltetett magyarországi közgyûlésnek naplója a tekintetes karoknál és rendeknél. Kossuth, 1951. pp. 24–43, pp. 152, 157, 168–196, 311–334, 341, 343, 345–348, 380–381, 391–406, 408–409, 412–413, 422– 425, 428–429, 619–628; Az 1847-ik esztendei Szent András hava 7-ik napjára rendeltetett magyarországi közgyûlésnek naplója a méltóságos fôrendeknél pp. 7–132; Varga, 1980; Varga, 1980–1981. 16 Hajnal, 1957; Szabad, 1977, pp. 86–110; Szabad, 1986, pp. 19–34; Urbán, 1986; Erdôdy, 1988; Gergely, 1989; Varga, 1993; Szabad, 2000; Gergely, 2001; Cf. Kosáry, 1999.

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2. The polemists of the mainstream of Hungarian liberalism, led by Deák, Batthyány and Kossuth, were the conservatives among the liberals alongside Széchenyi and the centralists, and the legitimacy of the state and the relationship to the empire were the central topics in the 1840s. The innovations of the 1830’s, we know, were in the first place thwarted by the government. Then the government started legal actions for disloyalty, one against Széchenyi’s friend and comrade Wesselényi. It persuaded Széchenyi that one could not introduce innovations contrary to the government, and Wesselényi had committed a mistake when he called the government to account. After the “reconciliation”—the amnesty putting an end to the disloyalty trials in 1840—Széchenyi presumed that the government would indeed support his reform plans or at the least remain neutral. This assumption made him turn more and more sharply against the reformist opposition, lest they should endanger the realization of his plans. Seeing the camp of the liberal reformists growing massively, he turned against the reformist opposition and above all Kossuth, motivated by his illusions about the government’s reformist measures and his own aristocratic liberalism. He felt that Kossuth was against the government and that liberalism was open to democracy. His polemic writings of the period as well as his visits to Metternich and roles undertaken in the government were all aimed at bridling the opposition and winning the benevolence of the government, hence promoting his own reform plans.17 This, in turn, led to the increasing mitigation of his reform program. He did not return to his liberalism of the 1830s before the late 1850s, when he defined his position in opposition to absolutism. In his late thoughts he had arrived at the point which was reached by Wesselényi back in the 1830s: linking the civilizatory program to combating absolutism. The representatives of absolutism, above all, the military governor archduke Albrecht and the minister of interior affairs, Adolf Thierry, treated anyone opposing them equally, making no distinction between Széchenyi and the conservatives, or Kossuth and his fellow emigrants. His premises were searched, the sought-for manuscripts were found among his and his secretary’s papers, and he was threat17 Széchenyi, 1841; Széchenyi, 1927, 6/1. pp. 3–8, 13–23, 33–196, 215–227, 249– 278, 280–286, 292–297, 303–320, 337–386, 389–402, 419–471, 479–528, 535–551, 561–595, 599–661, 690–743, 6/2. pp. 3–106, 129–241, 262– 265, 276–286, 305–316, 330–394, 434, 437–438, 441–455, 457–620, 622, 635–642, 658–670, 682–832, 974–979, 1021–1030, 1044–1045, 1094–1158. Cf. Varga, 1983, pp. 34–108, 147–153; Varga, 1993.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 169 ened with institutionalization in a private or public mental hospital and with the confiscation of his property. At around the same time, the police shot at demonstrators on the anniversary of the revolution, killing one of them. Széchenyi was again faced with the old dilemma: opposition or emperor. In this irresolvable situation his earlier suicidal tendencies returned and he shot himself in the head, dying as an opponent of absolutism.18 In his reform program, therefore, Széchenyi evaded the question of absolutism, and even tried to win the support of the government in the 1840s. His liberalism was aristocratic and antidemocratic, his nationalism based on the concept of the cultural nation, his political program was that of an aristocrat, his way of life adopted bourgeois achievements, while his outlook was perfectionist in its elements and utilitarian in essence. Inside and outside the liberal reformists’ circle many had illusions about the government’s intentions. In the 1830s and 40s, not only Széchenyi, pitting his aristocratic liberalist position against the reformist opposition, tried to convince the imperial government to increase the economic weight of Hungary; the centralists, headed by the novelist, political reformer and philanthropist József Eötvös, believed—at least for some time—that the natural counterweight to the outdated aristocratic system of institutions (taken to be the only generator of anachronisms) was the renewable diet, the repository of desirable changes, and that this renewal was to be expected of the imperial government. All there was to do was to convince the imperial leadership of the necessity of the changes and their sequence, and upon this beneficial influence they would take the inevitable steps. However, it was no accident that all who expected the imperial government to initiate the reforms fell victim to illusions, because Metternich had its own goal and strategy: the extension of the absolutist political structure, and the long-term integration of Hungary into the economy of the Empire.19 Eötvös’ liberalism had philanthropic, progressive roots, and although in 1842 he was still a backer of the county system and a nationalist, while turning against the counties and supporting centralization in 1843, he wanted fundamental reforms later as well. As in 1843, he thought the existing opposition was incapable of reform. He was ignorant of the real aims of the government, and, as he was convinced that Hungarian feudal institutions had to be transformed, he expected the government to launch initiatives and offered to be a partner in this process. After 1846, when he had fully realized that the government was not acting upon his 18 19

Csorba, 1991. Cf. Kosáry, 2001, pp. 333–552. Varga, 1980/1981, 2. pp. 176–189; Dénes, 1989, pp. 84–87; Gergely, 1990/1, pp. 1–8; Varga, 1993; Fenyô, 1997; Gángó, 1999.

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ideas, he joined the opposition again with conviction. After his emigration in autumn 1848, and particularly after his return to Hungary in the hope of founding a newspaper and of undertaking a political role during the period of absolutism, his patriotism was suppressed. His hopes remained unrealized and politically he drifted to the conservatives.20 In his “Dominant ideas,” he opined that the state was threatening individual freedom by gradually extending its authority under the pretext of the creation of political equality. Personal freedom precluded political equality, he claimed, liberalism and democracy being opposed to each other. In Eötvös’ view, the empire was a framework better suited to personal freedom than the nation-state, and political liberty was conditional upon the complex and delicate balance of centralization and self-government. In a reversal of Tocqueville, as it were, he defined the requirements of centralization precisely, leaving the conditions for self-government obscure. He also discarded political equality and revived the intellectual legacy of enlightened absolutism in his antidemocratic liberalism.21 Several of his former fellow centralists vehemently attacked Kossuth. Above all, they claimed that he did not reckon with imperial government, adhered too tightly to the county system and hankered after popularity. They accused him of irresponsibility and hunting for glory.22 Of that which the conservatives and Széchenyi had long condemned him: being a democrat. Széchenyi wanted far-reaching innovations, and the centralists called for fundamental changes. They had one aspect in common, which they also shared with the conservatives: all had illusions about absolutism and became its allies, consciously or unwittingly, for shorter or longer periods of time. All three came to oppose it at some point, but for different reasons. They were all polemists of the liberal reformist opposition, above all, Kossuth, many becoming his adversaries, some looking upon him as their enemy.

20

Eötvös, 1978, 1981. On the traditional idealized interpretation of Eötvös and the centralists, see: Szekfû, 2000. Other approaches and interpretations, see: Szabad, 1971, pp. 658–669; R. Várkonyi, 1973; Varga, 1980/81 2. pp. 163– 189; Gergely, 1990; Deák, 1990, pp. 7–28; Idem, 1993, pp. 38–47; Fenyô, 1997; Tamás, 1998/5–6, pp. 3–78; Gángó, 1999. 21 Eötvös, 1996–1998. On its interpretation and the whole background, see: Gángó, 1999. Cf. Constant, 1980, pp. 491–515; Berlin, 2002, pp. 166–217. 22 Cf. this book, pp. 193–223. Dénes, 1993, pp. 150–181. See also: Dénes, 1989, pp. 47–108; Varga, 1993.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 171 3. The conservatives branded those belonging to the liberal reformists as federalists, republicans and radicals. In their view, the liberals saw Hungary as an assembly of 52 independent small republics, challenged the rights of the monarch and the central government, as well as the central organs and the diet, curtailed their jurisdiction and subverted the existing order. In the conservatives’ interpretation, the “radicals” wished to replace the rule of the best based on qualitative selection—aristocratic social organization—with the rule of sheer numbers (which, as the French revolution had shown, would result in the dictatorship of a small group), a clean slate to replace the existing social hierarchy, and to replace order with anarchy. They excited the immature masses with utopias, whereas the masses needed governing, and they aroused the suspicion of the imperial government towards the Magyars, since they wanted to separate from the Empire, whereas the imperial government would have to be persuaded, its trust would have to be won.23 The conservative diagnosis was that in Hungary the state was not powerful and effective enough, while politics had to remain the privilege of the chosen few. At the core of their therapy was the ousting of the reformist liberal opposition from the county assemblies and the diet. The way to do so was to regulate the counties and the diet, turning them into administrative, i.e. executive, agencies through government officials. The therapy implied no less than the dismissal of the whole dietal majority instead of the resignation of the government when the dietal majority voted for a bill of non-confidence in the government (as it did in November 1844). The Hungarian conservatives were clearly aulic up to the 1840s, unconditionally supporting the court (its government) in the diets, especially in the upper house. In the 1840s, however, they embarked on an offensive on the forums dominated by the reformist opposition. In collaboration with the government, they labored to subdue the opposition at county meetings, in the diet and in the press, and sought to establish a party to rally the senior officials of central government agencies and the counties, with support from the Hungarian chancellor György Apponyi from 1844 onwards, and from the new chancellor of Transylvania, Samu Jósika. The first step to be taken was to curtail the 23

Dessewffy, 1887. pp. 24–48, 201–212, 218–226, 231–233, 269–276, 343–349, XX: Helyzetünk s a legsürgetôbb reformok. 27 parts. [Our situation and the most pressing reforms] Budapesti Híradó, 25, 27 October, 13, 22, 27, 29 November, 24 December 1846, 1, 3, 19, 26, 31 January, 5, 9, 26 February, 2 March, 4, 7, 14, 18, 21, 23, 27, 28, 30 May, 23, 25 July 1847; Dénes, 1989, pp. 28–53, 124–128.

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might of the reformist opposition majority in the county assemblies and the diet. Lest the dietal majority should call the government to resign, they organized a dietal majority to support the government. The party was organized in this vein and all steps were taken to this end. They acted out their role as defenders of the constitution, at odds with the intellectuals who, they claimed, were endangering constitutionalism. They were quite right in seeing that the liberals wished to transform the foundations of constitutionalism by reforming it, as they wished to found it on equality of all before the law, on political and human liberties for all. The conservatives’ safeguarding of the constitution was not sincere, as they did not want to conserve constitutionalism but strove to change it—to shift it towards absolutism, to independence from the court, to nudge it towards the political system of the hereditary lands in the hope of strengthening their own position as the agricultural suppliers of the empire, under the pretext of grasping the economic advantages of the Habsburg Empire for Hungary. They did not know Metternich’s conception, which had largely been inspired by them on several points, the implementation of which they—indirectly— facilitated. Thus they also innovated; they were not defenders of constitutionalism. The main target of their assaults were those who wanted both the extension of rights and assimilation, for they did not accept either of these. They had an image of the enemy, but no vision of the future. They regarded the liberals as their enemies, seeing Wesselényi as the most dangerous in the 1830s, and Kossuth in the 40s. The Conservative Party was founded on November 12, 1846, to mobilize its members to push back the liberal majority in the lower house so that a progovernment majority could be established. Personal rule versus the rule of institutional guarantees, influencing the diet from above versus popular representation, economic incorporation into the empire versus working out the conditions for a national economy: these were all in accord with Metternich’s plan. Nor was this accidental, for the plan itself was largely inspired by the Hungarian conservatives.24 The Hungarian conservatives did not redefine the national identity and did not play the role of the national party for the majority of the political community before 1848, although conservation had a broad social basis in the Hungarian nobility. The role of the national party was played by the Hungarian liberals, as they were the ones to undertake the liberal nationalist tasks, first of all the elaboration of the modern nation state and the program of assimilation via the extension of rights in order to create a liberal political community, a modern liberal nation.

24

Andics, 1952, 1965, 1981, 1. pp. 131–141; Andics, 1973, pp. 402–434; Varga, 1993.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 173 The Hungarian liberals responded to the late eighteenth-century “modernizing” challenge of enlightened absolutism in opposition to a foreign absolutism with their program of “interest harmonization,” which in turn set a challenge that invited the absolutist government and the Hungarian conservatives to respond to it.

IV. 1. The Hungarian liberals’ nation-concept was determined by a perfectionist outlook, by a belief in the improvement of humankind. In the writings of Széchenyi, Wesselényi and Kölcsey, as well as in the arguments of Deák, Kossuth, Eötvös, the journalist Pulszky and the economist Gorove, there were several common premises. One is the criticism of the position advocating the restriction of needs, a critique of Rousseau’s stoic viewpoint. All discarded the tenet that was formulated by Wesselényi in his counterargument as “be poor but free.” 25 Széchenyi in Hitel and Wesselényi in Balítéletekrôl made it unequivocal that poverty bred misery, helplessness and despotism, and material growth and spiritual enrichment were necessary and indispensable preconditions of freedom: freedom and property were interdependent. Another premise they shared concerned the relation between the individual, the nation and humankind. They claimed that the individual promoted his own good and the good of the nation when he unfolded his abilities for the sake of human perfection. The improvement of the individual’s external conditions and the development of his inner endowments were conditional upon each other, individual and national perfectibility were interdependent; the progress of mankind took place within the framework of the nations, with civilization and the humanization of mankind being its content, since the state of savagery, and brute force, had to give way to culture, diligence, and industry.26 The Magyars, however, were threatened by extinction as a nation. As Johann Gottfried Herder prophesied, they were to be devoured by the Germanic and Slavic onslanght within a century or two, and their language would disappear without a trace.27 That is also one reason why

25

Wesselényi, 1833, pp. 99–114, esp. 103–111; Széchenyi, 1831, p. 197. Széchenyi, 1830; Idem, 1831; Wesselényi, 1833; Kölcsey, 1960, 2. pp. 343– 629, Kossuth, 1966, pp. 368–387; Deák, 1903. 1. pp. 218–260, 443, 466–468, Kossuth, 1841; Eötvös, 1841; Gorove, 1842; Pulszky, 1842, (Kossuth Lajos:) “Adalék a centralizációróli fejztegetésekhez.” [Addenda to the discussion about centralization] Pesti Hírlap, 20 February 1842. 27 Herder, 1952, 2. p. 476. Cf. Berlin, 1976. 26

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the Hungarians had to become civilized, achieved through the extension of rights and securing an unquestionable place in the community of civilized European nations. The vision of the death of the nation was not only a poetic image, but a realistic danger for the public: the threat of Germanization and panSlavism. A strong emphasis was given to Herder’s prophecy by Joseph II’s enlightened absolutist attempt to unify the Habsburg Empire and make it unilingual, meaning Germanization, on the one hand, and by the partition of Poland and the cruel quenching of its freedom struggles on the other. The enemy image of the Hungarian liberal reformists stemmed from the experience of the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1831. This prompted the image of a Russian Empire that was to determine the attitude of the Hungarian public to Russia over the next century. The Russian Empire became the main threat to civilization and constitutionalism, the enemy to European achievements and development, a state of barbarism and crude force. It was ruled by autocracy and Asian despotism, which could gradually increase its influence on the future of Europe. Its flexible diplomacy and strong army had been threatening the Habsburg Empire and Hungary especially since the termination of the Napoleonic wars, for with the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, Russia had been penetrating into the vacuum it left behind as the guardian of the Eastern Slavs, gaining ever newer positions and a decisive influence.28 This image—reminding one of the account in the counterpart to Tocqueville’s book on America, Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839. Letters from Russia—and the sense of danger had real causes that were not negligible. First and foremost, the non-privileged were not interested in the conservation of constitutionalism. In the northern, north-eastern and southern parts of Hungary large numbers of ethnic Slavs lived, the South Slavs had a separate legal system and government different from the Hungarian one, their political life in Croatia and the Military Frontier Zone being controlled directly or indirectly by Vienna. What Wesselényi, Deák and Kossuth feared was not unfounded: that the “northern colossus” would bracket the Hungarians by establishing one (or rather two) great Slavic states as the patron of Christian Slavs, forcing the Magyars onto an unwanted course instead of using any direct offensive. Since the rest of the European nations were absorbed with their momentary concerns, they would see little reason to prevent this from happening, even though the Russian Empire was threatening the whole civilized world. If Russian expansion were not checked, the nations of

28

Varga, 1993; Cf. Bibó, 1986–90, 1. pp. 316–364, 502–514, 2. pp. 185–265, 569–619.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 175 Europe would lose their freedom. Legal rights would have to be extended to the unprivileged, and the imperial government would have to restore constitutional foundations in the western lands so that the former privileged and unprivileged in Hungary as well as the empire and Hungary could join forces in warding off the barbarian incursion.29

2. This sinister interpretation of the situation and the nation was not, on its essential points, shared by István Széchenyi. He voiced and systematized the requirements of civilizing Hungarian economic, social and political conditions parallel with the extension of rights in his writings of the 1830s. From 1841, however, he confronted the task of preserving Hungarian national characteristics with civilization and extension of liberties, “nation” with “progress,” or, to use terms from later periods, “national self-centeredness” with the “adoption of European models.” In Széchenyi’s view, Magyars were an Eastern race, “a people of the East” without relatives in Europe, in an intricate situation, for a constitutional nation lived in mixed marriage with an absolutist empire, threatened by the superiority of German civilization and the numeric weight of different nationalities, although the thoughtless extension of rights would easily give rise to a situation in which the Magyars would lose their national characteristics. For this reason, the safeguarding of national traits would have to be subordinated to civilization and emancipation. Linguistic Magyarization—which Széchenyi identified with the nationality policy of the liberal reformist opposition in his address to the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences in 1842—was superficial and aggressive, breeding nationality movements in response, whereas the Hungarian nation should be a melting pot, should obtain civilizatory pre-eminence with an attraction to the rest of the nationalities so that instead of being absorbed itself it could absorb others. From this it would follow—in contrast to his conclusion drawn in A Kelet népe—that the central task was the acquisition of superiority in civilization, the extension of human and political liberties.30

29

Tocqueville, 1986; Custine, 1975; Wesselényi, 1992, Ferenc Deák’s letter to József Oszterhuber: pp. 283–292. Cf. Varga, 1993; Szabad, 1986. 30 Széchenyi, 1830; Idem, 1831; Idem, 1833; Idem, 1835; Idem, 1841; Széchenyi, 1927, pp. 33–196, 280–286, 292–297, 303–320, 337–386, 389–402, 430– 458, 479–513, 535–551, 561–595, 599–661, 716–743, 786–810, Széchenyi, 1930. pp. 3–106, 129–241, 262–265, 276–286, 305–316, 330–394, 449–455, 457–620, 635–642, 658–670, 682–832, 1094–1158. Cf. Trócsányi, 1965; Barany, 1968; Gergely, 1972; on the concept at issue: Varga, 1993.

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What the Hungarian reformist liberals posited as the conception of assimilation via emancipation differed from Széchenyi’s position in the evaluation of the threat of Germanization and pan-Slavism (and its corollary, in the interpretation of the nature of the nationality movements). They were also at variance in their judgment of the relationship with the Empire. There are differences in the interpretation of the “unifying interests”—and not only between the reformist opposition and Széchenyi’s views of the 1840s, but also between Széchenyi’s own works of the 1830s and those of the 1840s. He undervalued the weight of the nationality movements, taking them for simple reactions (which was just as simplifying as was the tenet of “pan-Slavic agitation”), and he did not ascribe due importance to the menace of Germanization and panSlavism. As for the relationship with the Empire, the liberal reformists called for constitutionalization, while Széchenyi (and the conservatives) deemed accommodation to the absolutist imperial government necessary and desirable.31

3. In the liberals’ terminology the Hungarian nation implied several connotations. It designated the traditional stratum of the Hungarian nation, the “natio Hungarica,” the aggregate of the privileged, conceived in a novel light. This aspect of the term was a situation assessment, but a critical and not an idealized one. When projecting the norm back into the past, the Hungarian liberals called on the privileged class old and new to account for assimilation through the extension of rights, in addition to and ahead of the noble virtues they were to supposed to possess. This meant that their interpretation of the past was at best ambivalent, as the appreciation of the freedom struggles against absolutism and of the traditions of independent statehood was paired with a criticism of the lack of civilization and with a condemnation of the narrow basis of constitutionalism.32 The other connotation of the Hungarian nation was a program: the program of creating a modern, civilized nation. The Hungarian nation to be created would unite individuals of different tongues, legal status, religion and occupation tied to different regions by the assimilating force of emancipation, by giving them equal rights before the law. The Hungarian “citoyens” of identical legal status, the citizens of the Hungarian state would constitute a middle-class society whose members would be 31 32

Varga, 1993. Wesselényi, 1843, pp. 5–17; Széchenyi, 1830; Idem, 1831, Wesselényi, 1833, Kölcsey, 1960, 2. pp. 343–629, Kossuth, 1966, pp. 368–387, Deák, 1903, 1. pp. 218– 260, 443, 466–468.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 177 free property owners, citizens of a modern, civilized, European Hungary.33 Linguistic nationalism did permeate this conception, but not by itself: it was integrated in the program of political emancipation. Nationalization meant the replacement of Latin by Hungarian in public life, what language to speak in private was an individual choice. This concept of a nation in an endangered situation clearly mirrors the influence of Joseph II’s and the French revolution’s projected unilingual nationstate.34 Despite all doubts and worries, the liberal conception was dominated by a faith in the assimilating force of political emancipation. Before 1848, however, there was no room in the nation concept for federative nationality rights, only for the assertion of the (postulated and normative) will of the majority. In the long run, the strategy of emancipatory assimilation was replaced by the withdrawal of equal human rights, by state protectionism, because of the shock of the disruption of historical Hungary and the blind alley of democratization. The protection of minorities and the institutional system that would ensure it, as well as the conception of collective rights, is even today more a program than a reality.35

4. The Hungarian conservatives’ concept of the nation was determined by responding to the liberal challenge. They did not wish to transform a society stratified by privileges into a modern society of personally free individuals who are free-property owners, and thus did not want to assimilate the non-privileged and non-Hungarians, but expected their political passivity and obedience. They advocated neither the extension of rights nor emancipation, but rather a state guarantee of privileges. This is what characterized the conservatives’ concept of nation and nationality (deemed tolerant by many but actually underestimating the nationality issue). The conservatives—as described above—parried the liberalists’ challenge in defence of the constitution. They realized—rightly—that the liberals were adopting a different principle of societal organization from the currently valid aristocratic constitution and refused to accept the 33

Hajnóczy, 1958 pp. 27–96, 153–185, 285–303; Wesselényi, 1833; Idem, 1843; Kossuth, 1966, 6. pp. 368–387; Deák, 1903, 1. pp. 218–260, 443, 466–468; Kossuth, 1841; Eötvös, 1841; Gorove, 1842; Pulszky, 1842. 34 Varga, 1993. 35 Cf. Bibó, 1986–90, 1. pp. 316–364, 502–514, 2. pp. 185–265, 569–619, 671–797; Kis, 1997, pp. 129–184.

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absolutism of the empire, trying even to push that towards constitutionalism. In their opinion, the liberals disrupted property relations and were actually radicals who were outside the domain of constitutional politics. The conservatives did not regard either Germanization or pan-Slavism as real threats, for they thought the true danger to the survival of the Hungarian nation was the acquisition of rights by the unprivileged. While in his pamphlet Wolfgang Berg threatened the Hungarians with degradation to a German colony or a Russian province if they did not give up their urge for reforms, the Hungarian conservatives identified the extinction of the nation with the extension of rights. This they could do easily as they identified the Hungarian nation with the nobility, precisely with the aristocracy and the large landowning noblemen, a stratum many members of which would have to be re-Magyarized. In the opinion of Emil Dessewffy and Antal Szécsen, an imperative was not the giving of rights to the unprivileged; that would be dangerous, detrimental and useless for the nation, since the character of a nation was determined by the state, from which it could not be considered separately. The question, in their view, was who held the state under their control. For them, it was naturally the Hungarians’ but Hungarians here meant the well-off privileged class, into whose ranks one could rise via individual excellence and ennoblement (or the like). As the conservatives’ nation concept suggests, they had no past or future concept, but they did have a definite image of the enemy. They had no concept of the future, resting as they did on the foundation of a system of privileges, regarding the privileged of a narrowly interpreted aristocratic societal organization as Hungarians, whose Magyarhood could have been legitimated by an idealized past at best, which, however, also implied that the tradition of independent statehood was not in a shape that could be conserved. The question remained what the change should be like and who jeopardized the interests and existence of the Hungarians. The defence of the constitution, loyalty to the monarch, the safeguarding of the throne, the altar and the constitution, a respect for property, “progress with prudence” all referred to something else, something to be circumscribed by the dichotomies of aristocracy and democracy, quality and quantity, order and anarchy, loyalty and separatism, imperial relations and rebelliousness, organic development and daydreaming, realism and passions. The “radicals,” the “kuruc side,” the “dilettantes”—so the conservatives claimed—expropriated the role of the national party, although they were the ones who risked the survival of the nation with their thoughtless and selfish political actions. The conservatives’ concept of the enemy discloses the specific essence of their self-definition: while the liberals’ concept of the enemy was associated with the real threat of

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 179 Germanization and “pan-Slavism,” paired with conclusions drawn from the backwardness of the country and from the absolutism of Vienna, the conservatives did not use their experiences of a Hungarian reality to mobilize such fears, but projected upon their enemies the images developed concerning the Jacobins of the French revolution and the aulic concepts of the anti-Habsburg “kuruc” rebels. It concealed a theoretically empty position, a non-authentic enemy concept that tried to make up for a lack of content in the conservative role, most conspicuously in the definition of the national conservative role. The insistence that the opposition must not be allowed to appropriate the nationalist role remained without a real program or norm and forced the conservatives to assume the role of a national party (in the form of political autonomy within the empire). The defiance and irresponsibility of this reaction is obvious.36 Politics based on personal relations, personal loyalty pledged (as in a blind bargain) to chancellors György Apponyi and Samu Jósika could not on key issues be sufficient ground for an authentic conservative program, and the program was indeed unauthentic. It remained what it was devised for: the inadequate form of absolutist imperial government policy mobilizing with the goal of dismissing the opposition majority in the lower house.

V. 1. Already in Hitel, Széchenyi argued for civilized conditions and a utilitarian mentality to be introduced mainly following the model of England, earning the epithet “Anglomaniac”, an uncritical borrowing of foreign models, from his conservative adversaries. In Balítéletekrôl, Wesselényi also outlined his impressions of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands in his explications about civilized behavior and thinking. Confronted with Hungarian reality, these aristocrats who toured western Europe had experiences similar to the finding of such intellectuals as Bertalan Szemere and Sándor Bölöni Farkas.37 On the basis of direct and indirect experiences, the notion of the civilized world was reinterpreted, no longer primarily designating the ancient Greco-Roman culture, or French letters, but also including England, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland as representatives of the new mentality. That was the age when in addition to Greek, 36

Cf. Varga, 1983, pp. 109–146; Dénes, 1989, pp. 28–124, 168–185; Varga, 1993. 37 Széchenyi, 1830; Idem, 1831; Wesselényi, 1833; Bölöni, 1838; Szemere, 1845.

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Latin, French and German, the English language was also added. The readings of an educated person now included, apart from the ancient authors, the German theorists of the state and French historians and writers, the contemporary classics of British economy, moral philosophy and political theory. Within the intellectual horizon were the Poles and the Americans, and on the periphery was the Ottoman Empire with its peoples, the Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese among the South European nations, and the Asian foe, the “northern colossus,” the menacing Russian Empire had considerable clout. Europe was the intellectual and political context for the liberals, but the Nordic peoples (Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Finns) were represented at the level of the exotic or as analogies, so Europe mostly meant West and Central Europe, above all, the British, the French and the Germans. Europe was not only a metonym for a part of it, but also an abstraction: an identification of civilization and constitutionalism, although it was rarely used in its abstract form. The models of civilization and constitutional development were Britain, France and Germany but not without criticism. The United Kingdom was the epitome, although the idealizing image disseminated by Montesquieu was largely offset by the influence of Jeremy Bentham, by information about destitution in Ireland and by autonomous thinking (also whetted by an unprejudiced view of British political life). Nor was the image of France entertained by the liberals so dismissive as that of the conservatives. They took note not only of the Jacobinic dictatorship and Napoleon, but also of the abolition of the system of privileges and the fight against any kind of state despotism. They also realized that, unlike earlier absolutistic systems, since 1830 France had been a constitutional state with a strengthening bourgeois society. French centralization exerted a positive influence on only a handful of thinkers, including József Eötvös, Ágoston Trefort, László Szalay and Antal Csengery, most of the liberals seeing it as a frightful example, inspiring Ferenc Pulszky, for instance, to devote a series of articles to centralization in 1842. On the other hand, the achievements of French civilization and the constitution adopted there were held in high esteem by all of them, which prevented them from accepting the conservative distortion depicting the French as the artificial disrupters of European monarchic political evolution, and the French representative system and form of government as the implementation of unrealistic principles with fatal consequences. The liberals knew French political conditions far more thoroughly than the conservative critics did. The aim of the knowledge and popularization of the British and French situation was not to urge a mechanical imitation but to articulate the need to modernize the society, to cultivate its environment, and to take up arms against absolutism.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 181 The Hungarian liberals shared their experiences of the United States with the public, warned against the expansionism of the Russian Empire, viewed Switzerland and, above all, the Polish nation—the populations of (partitioned) former Poland—with sympathy and solidarity, but their views of the German states were ambivalent. They were apprehensive of the economic superiority of the German Customs Union (Zollverein) and especially of the prospect of the Austrian Empire joining the Zollverein. Not without reason, because they anticipated an enhanced Germanization. Most of the newspapers available to them were in German; the German language, however, was not only a known and used tool but a vehicle of civilization whose contents had to be Magyarized, translated into Hungarian. The Prussian liberation of serfs and a reformed system of taxation were positive examples, while Prussian absolutism was opposed and the German attempts and movements towards constitutionalism were potential allies. The Hungarian liberals spoke out against the anti-Hungarian articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung of Augsburg; under and despite the conditions of inner censorship and the external circumstances of the journalists influenced by Metternich, they published regular quarterlies, pamphlets and collections of political writings of the opposition in Leipzig and Hamburg, for by influencing the German political public they wished to win the sympathy of the West European public. Although it is still unclear exactly what they achieved, their efforts presumably did not offset antiHungarian propaganda.38 The Hungarian liberals envisioned an alliance of European constitutional nations based on self-determination, which could above all stop the expansionist drives of the Russian Empire, and hoped to achieve a new type of equilibrium in the long run. The foreign political ideas of the Batthyány government were not without precedent: the foreign political horizon of the liberal reformists was far more open than that of their conservative adversaries.39 Its nature was tied to the notion of 38

Researchers have yet to elaborate the Hungarian liberals’ perception of foreign countries. The above conclusion was drawn on the basis of arguments, news and interpretations in newspapers, pamphlets, and dietal disputes concerning the outside world. Lack of space prevents me from listing all the sources. It is worth reading Ferenc Pulszky’s series of articles and Kossuth’s commentaries which was pointed out to me by János Varga in the seventies. Pulszky, 1842. About the America-concept, see: Szabad, 1975, pp. 551–573; Vörös, 1985, 2. pp. 647–662; Závodszky, 1992. Cf. Jedlicki, 1986, pp. 669–686. For the broader context of the theme, see: Dénes, 1993; Janowski, 1998; Jedlicki, 1999. 39 The Batthyány government’s image of the future and political strategy was explored by István Hajnal and elaborated by Gábor Erdôdy and András Gergely.

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assimilation via the extension of rights and fitted into the context it determined. Their future concept was not restricted to the internal conditions of creating a Hungarian middle-class society but also covered external conditions. This, in turn, clashed with the existence and aspirations of the non-Magyar nationalities and against the traditional conception of the European balance of power. Their argumentation simultaneously implied the themes and logic of the discourses of both the “adoption of European models” and “national self-centeredness.” But, unlike in the later developments, the two were synthesized as integral constituents.

2. Similar to their concepts of society, state and nation, the conservatives’ view of foreign nations was a reply to the liberal challenge. The different models, the English and the French ways of addressing social and political transformations, were touched on by Aurél Dessewffy, and they were systematically reviewed by the scholar and journalist Ferenc Kállay. In Dessewffy’s opinion, it was the large landed estate that safeguarded English development from major shocks and counterbalanced the monied plutocracy’s lack of scruples, while it was the absence of a large estate which resulted in French cataclysms.40 Industrialization necessarily bred misery, as did the abolition of the large landed estate, Ferenc Kállay argued, introducing and interpreting Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. The system of political institutions to be constructed in Western countries was an experiment the outcome of which was still vague, and what was to be discerned from it generated reservations rather than approval as a model to be followed. In France, since the power of the landowning aristocracy shifted to the plutocracy, the feudal hierarchy had been replaced by subordination to more brutal and impersonal forces, and the ideal of majority rule was in reality a frightful example of the rule of sheer numbers, bringing moral degradation, corruption, with party politics only paying lip-service to the sovereignty of the people. England was not a liberal example, as its constitution was determined by aristocratic, organic features and the functions of constitutional institutions were not characterized by the division of powers, but rather by the mixing and fusion of powers, Kállay declared, following Bülau, Wincke and Hallam. The representative system, as exemplified

40

Dessewffy, 1887, pp. 21–48, 68–72, 201–212, 218–226, 231–233, 343–349; Varga, 1993; Dénes, 1989, pp. 28–53.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 183 by France, to appease the majority, which necessarily led to corruption, while in Prussia the paternalist government and the invited representatives in the provincial assemblies were exemplary because governance was not the outcome of bargains, of consensus, but was based on the moral unity of the fuler and the nation in which the justification for political participation was landed property as the only guarantee of moral weight.41 The intellectuals denied their own profession if they did not rest content with their occupation and laid claim to political activity, as the latter was conditional upon landed property—which is a key argument not only in Kállay’s explanation but also in the reasoning of the leading figure amongst the conservatives, Antal Szécsen.42 Aligned with the conservatives’ enemy image was the conservative interpretation of the West European and North American situation, and of the Hungarians’ mediating role towards the east, the mission to spread constitutionalism and civilization. Kállay was the one to describe the political conditions in foreign countries, including the United States and the Russia. The conservative journalist was critical of the United States but defended the Russian Empire, polemizing with Wesselényi’s Szózat. The tsarist empire, he noted had a civilizing mission in Asia, and the domestic situation could not be as dire as Wesselényi wrote, since slavery had been abolished in Russia. That the Poles had to be subdued was not the fault of the Russian monarch but that of the eternally rebellious Poles themselves, who were threatening the European balance of power and the legitimacy of the monarchy. The Russian Empire was the champion of peace and lawfulness by preventing the Polish rebels from tilting the balance of the monarchies in Europe. While Russians were characterized by obedience and discipline, the typical traits of the Americans were self-interest, vanity, jealousy and title-hunting. The inhabitants of America went in for earthly goods, politics, the daily newspapers, and had no time left for serious science and art, whose flourishing lack of was inadvertently influenced by the republican form of government. The rich had to keep their wealth in secret as there was no room for excellence, for real nobility, in short, for the aristocracy because the uneducated were overpowering the educated, quantity was predominant over quality. The republic was not the suitable form of government in a large country,

41

Kállay, 1845, 1847. Cf. Idem: Visszhang a majorátusok ügyében. [A contribution to the cause of mayoralty] 2 parts; Idem: Pauperismus. 2 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 6, 8, 10, 12 March 1846. 42 Szécsen, 1845.

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since it precluded the only possible and desirable organization of society as the basis of a well-run state: aristocratic societal organization.43 The conservatives’ concepts of the external worlds also represented the protection of the privilege system. Kállay separated the English conditions from the model of liberalism (correct in the details but with distortions on the whole, as he ignored the lack of absolutism, the consequences of the seventeenth-century revolution, the achievements of the ecclesiastic and secular self-governmental systems, and the potential for individual enterprise), branded the French and American conditions (through massive simplifications and distortions), and held up Prussian absolutism as the model to be emulated. Kállay’s interpretation was the most advanced form the conservatives’ ideas of foreign countries took. His image of foreign lands was determined by the social organization of master and servant, by a state administration of governors and the governed. Some conservatives contended that the Hungarian nation had brought its culture from Asia, others opined that it was borrowed from the Germans, but they both agreed that it could assert its constitution, and nationality, in its country and in East Europe because the Habsburg Empire was supporting it. The privileged Hungarian nobility, the Hungarian nation was again reduced to accepting the support of the Viennese government against the threat of the unprivileged. The existence and security of the nation was guaranteed by the empire, and the empire was guaranteed by the European status quo. The European equilibrium was based on monarchic legitimity, with its mainstay being the Habsburg Empire. It was a large and advanced political and economic reality, accommodation to which was both necessary and advisable.44 The price and limit of accommodation were left obscure, as was the content of advancement, for in place of guarantees, all conservative politics could offer was the effectiveness of informal policy-making at a time when Austria symbolized the court + and + the relation between the Burg

43 44

Kállay, 1842; Kállay, 1843; Kállay, 1845. Dessewffy, 1843, (Lipthay Sándor: ) Idem: Politikai stabilitás. 2 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 9, 11 February 1845; Idem: Politikai stabilitás elve. [The principle of political stability] 3 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 14 February, 11, 13 March 1845; Idem: A politikai pártok életmûszerzése. [The emergence and working of the political parties] 16 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 20, 22, 25 April, 2 May, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 19, 22, 24, 26 June, 1, 4, 10 July 1845, Gróf Dessewffy Emil: Legyünk ôszinték. [Let’s be honest] 7 parts. Budapesti Híradó, 1, 8, 12, 15, 22, 24, 31 May 1846, K (állay) F (erenc): Szózat. [Address] 2 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 7, 9 March 1847, Gróf Dessewffy Emil: Nyílt levelek Erôs Lajoshoz, Szabolcsba. [Open letters to Lajos Erôs in Szabolcs] 6 parts. Budapesti Híradó, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23 February 1847; Dénes, 1989, pp. 53–124.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 185 and the provinces, a unity politically even less developed than the Hungarian one. The Hungarian conservatives featured in the role of the advocates of “national self-centeredness” (to use a later term again) and accused their adversaries of copying foreign patterns. However, their role does not fit either the framework of “national self-centeredness,” national identity, national tradition, or those of “adopting European models,” that is, civilization and modernization. In their selection from the European patterns and interpretation of the Hungarian constitution their role was determined by the modernization of the protection of privileges, hence their identity could not coalesce into a program, as it could only have been implemented against modernizing absolutism.

VI. 1. Liberty in the liberal interpretation implies political self-government and personal freedom alike. The antithesis to liberty is tyranny. It is despotism which in Plato’s view is the control of others by someone who cannot control himself. Aristotle, by contrast, regarded tyranny as the rule of a person who exercises his authority for his own interest and not for the interest of the public. The interpretation of the liberals was not far from their description, but it was closest to the way Montesquieu saw it, as could, and can, be read in his Esprit de lois. Tyranny in this interpretation is the rule of one man based on autocracy instead of laws. The illegal, unconstitutional, arbitrary power of the tyrant is exercised alone, without the mediation of the nobility, and it is only bridled by religion. The fundamental principle of tyranny is fear: subjects fear the tyrant and each other. The liberals used the terms tyranny, despotism and absolutism synonymously. Its antinomy in their concept was constitutionalism. When interpreting constitutionalism, they also drew on Montesquieu in the first instance, in addition to several other sources. Above all, constitutionalism means the absence of despotism, the existence of an ordered state, where the rule of law has an effect over the rule of men. The rule of law is ensured by the prevention of the concentration of power, the division of the branches of power, and is sustained by political self-government.45 The members of the political self-

45

Montesquieu’s interpretation of liberty was borrowed almost word by word by Kossuth in his writing of 1833. See: Kossuth, 1966, pp. 369–371.

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government are free and constitute the political community, the nation. Freedom is the basis of the nation, and the nation is the context of freedom. The nation is the framework, subject and end of politics, its content is first of all constitutionalism, freedom. The nation is a political community which is determined by descent, a common past, its memory, collectively experienced events, the national language, culture, and above all the constitution, the exercising of rights and obligations. The nation is based on the constitution, which, in turn, is based on freedom. The free community is inseparable from the free citizens; one cannot exist without the other. The experience and blessings of freedom are ensured for the individual by the nation, the political community. The individual becomes free by asserting his rights, and he performs his duties towards the political community self-evidently, as he thereby serves his own community and his own liberty.46 The liberal nationalist concept of liberty adopted by the Hungarian liberals was reinterpreted by Kossuth. His interpretation was open to democracy and inspired by republicanism. His ideas of nation and freedom were interdependent, just as his interpretations of political and individual freedom were conditional on each other. The cause of the community and the cause of liberty were inseparable in his thinking.47 In the liberals’ interpretation, liberty meant individual freedom and political freedom identified with self-government. The two were mutually dependent: political freedom was the guarantee of individual liberty, while personal liberty was the end of political freedom. This gave rise to the order of liberty, the constitutional political community, the state of the modern nation.

2. The basic dichotomy of the conservatives was order versus anarchy. Order meant constitutionalism based on the sovereignty of the monarch and on the privileges he bestowed. The privilege bestowed by the sovereign meant individual liberty as a personal state of exception (originally directly subordinated to royal jurisdiction) as against the unprivileged, as well as the enforcement of this right as the privilege of participating in political life.

46

”The greatest happiness of the greatest number”: Jeremy Bentham’s phrase was translated into Hungarian and used by all members of the Hungarian liberalist elite, from Széchenyi to Kossuth. 47 Cf. Arendt, 1993; Arendt, 1993a; Pettit, 1997; Skinner, 1998; Gelderen– Skinner, eds., 2002.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 187 In their conception this was based on individual merit, one-time valance and present-day property status. Entry into the realm of the privileged was ensured by ennoblement. The branches of power could not be sharply differentiated since the ruler was a constitutional king who governed the lives of his subjects by the grace of God. He was not only a symbol of the continuity of the state but the source of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this case meant that the ruler made his decision after listening to the Hungarian government agencies instead of ignoring them. He appointed the judges and senior officials of government bodies, he invited members to the legislature, and, naturally, he invited and appointed those he found worthy of the honor. The parts of the legislature were rigidly subordinated: the lower house was subordinate to the upper house, the upper house consisting of aristocrats, chief government dignitaries and advisers to the ruler who were directly subordinated to the monarch. Constitutional politics meant good advice given to the ruler and obedience to him, instead of the representation of the people. Any attempt to change this setup resulted in anarchy, turmoil, the rule of the mob, or, the replacement of the system of privileges based on merit by a system of privilege based on sheer hunger for possessions, on profiteering. Those who initiated this system were the intellectuals who embraced the cause of the propertyless, who called for justice, but stealthily prepared their own enrichment and facilitated dependencies far worse than the existing relations. With that, they prepared the demise of the participants in constitutional politics, of the nation organized on the basis of landed property earned for former valiance. Regnum and natio, kingdom and nation were interrelated: the kingdom was the country based on the nobility constituting the nation. Endangering this state of affairs with unrealistic daydreams, utopias, republican experiments, which upset power balance in Europe, the natural hierarchical stratification of human society and the superiority of virtue over sheer possession. Thus, in the conservative interpretation, competent, sober, realistic politics based on reason was pitted against dilettante, emotional, unrealistic, passion politics. Obviously, the conservatives borrowed much from Aristotle and Montesquieu, especially from their government-typologies. There are several analogies, though their direct philological influence cannot be demonstrated, between their critical thinking and the argumentations of Charles de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre.48 They were more deeply influenced by Adam Müller’s, Friedrich Karl Savigny’s and Karl Ludwig Haller’s interpretations of the state.49 48 49

Bonald, 1818; Maistre, 1884–1887; Cf. Berlin, 1991, pp. 91–174. Haller, 1816/1817; Savigny, 1840, Müller, 1931.

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From the ancient concepts of government they borrowed the critiques of democracy, the tenets of the superiority of monarchy and aristocracy. From Montesquieu they picked some thoughts about the monarchy. They apparently knew and drew on Burke’s criticism of the revolution in Friedrich Gentz’s translation.50 However, they mainly testify to the influence of Müller’s and Savigny’s arguments, which claimed that without the state there was no society, the two were inseparable, so separation in theory was a senseless fiction.

VII. The elite of the reformist opposition advocating “liberty” and “property” in the second half of the 1840s amounted to some two hundred people, while the vanguard of the aristocratic liberals headed by Széchenyi numbered about fifty.51 When the conservative party was founded, one hundred and fiftytwo people were present, some of them officially delegated civil servants. The exploration of the size of the rank and file directed by the party leaders still awaits research. One must refrain from projecting the specificities of the centralized and disciplined mass parties of the twentieth century into the past, and also from associating the mobilizable following of a club-like and heterogeneous party with a certain region, social stratum or religious denomination. The “Transdanubian vs. TransTiszaian,” “aristocrat vs. lower nobility,” “Catholic vs. Protestant” dichotomies all cover up, rather than uncover the social basis to be explored by historical research. All that can be stated is that in the camp of the liberal reformists the influence of the gentry and the intellectuals was probably decisive, while among the conservatives, the aristocrats and the officials of the administration were overrepresented. Under the leadership of the liberal political elite, the overwhelming majority of Hungarians—the former privileged and unprivileged—fought in 1848-49 in defense of the 1848 laws against the separatist movements of the Transylvanian Romanians and Serbs in the Frontier Zone, as well as Croatia, against the regular army of the Austrian Empire, then against Austrian and Russian intervention. A greater part of the conservative elite, however, sympathized with the Austrian imperial troops when they attacked the Hungarians engaged in a defensive war, and some were even sympathetic with the ruler and the army of the Russian Empire. From its introduction until 1860, Germanizing absolutism did not spare the Hungarian liberals, but also suppressed the conservatives 50 51

Burke, 1793. Kind information from János Varga.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 189 because the Austrian absolutist centralization was suspicious of Hungarians as such. Thanks to the financial and military crisis of the Austrian Empire in 1860, they took the helm for a brief period to pacify the strongest nationality of the empire with concessions. Their attempt failed by virtue of the limited concessions and their own unpopularity, so they were pushed into the background again. A modified (enlarged) variant of the conservative attempt at a compromise was pushed through with the help of the conservatives by their former opponents who regarded their brainchild as liberal. With the passage of time, the conservatives put themselves increasingly in the role of the national party— not so much in political reality but in the spontaneously evolving world of legends. As a captive of a system incapable of self-correction, Hungarian liberalism was discredited, losing face with the domestic public at first, and gradually abroad as well. The dead-end streets of Hungarian democratic development, the simultaneous collapse of historical Hungary and the Monarchy, and the disannexation of two-thirds of the country’s territory (including areas only populated by Hungarians) promoted the subsequent glorification of the conservatives and conservativism and questioned the grounds for the existence of liberals and liberalism. The idealization of the conservatives—in both a direct and indirect form, projecting their stance upon Széchenyi and the centralists, and idealizing them and their successors—was moulded into a highly influential historical explanation in Gyula Szekfû’s Három nemzedék [Three generations] and Magyar történet [Hungarian history]. In the dispute over nation and absolutism associated with the name of Erik Molnár, one of the politicians and ideologues of the post-1956 Communist regime, which shattered the taboos of Stalinist indoctrination to replace them with new ones, this interpretation became the basic element of ideological and scholarly discourse in such a way that the aristocratic uprisings and freedom struggles were condemned as separatist and regressive while the Habsburg Empire was judged as progressive. The conservative renaissance during the Kádár regime was connected to the justification of the privilege system, and after the political turn in 1989 the anti-liberal conservativism in the conservative parties’ concepts of self and enemy again assumed a decisive weight, and its presence in political discourse and its impact is a factor that influences the mentality of the general public.

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Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 191 Bonald, M. le Vicomte de. 1818. Oeuvres de M. de Bonald. 11 volumes. Paris: A. Le Clere et cie. Burke, Edmund. 1793. Betrachtungen über die französische revolution. Berlin: Vieweg. Custine, Marquis de. 1975. Lettres de Russie. La Russie en 1839. (Sel., ed. Nora, Pierre). Paris: Gallimard. Csorba, László. 1988. Garibaldi élete és kora. [Garibaldi. His life and age]. Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. ———. 1991. Széchenyi István. Budapest: Officina Nova. ———. 1999. A vallásalap “jogi természete”. Az egyházi vagyon problémája a polgári átalakulás korának Magyarországán 1782–1918 [The “juristic nature” of the religious foundation. The landed property-question of the Catholic church in the age of embourgeoisement in Hungary]. Budapest: ELTE Mûvelôdéstörténeti Tanszék. ———. 2003. ‘Az önkényuralom kora 1849–1867.’ [The age of absolutism] In ed. András Gergely, Magyarország története a 19. században. [The History of Hungary in the 19th century]. Budapest: Osiris, pp. 279–326. Deák, Ágnes. 1990. “A magyar nemzet jövôje kultúra kérdése.” (Eötvös József nemzetiségpolitikai koncepciója 1850–1868). [“The future of the Hungarian nation is a question of culture.” (The nationality policy of József Eötvös 1850–1868)] Aetas, 1–2. pp. 7–28. ———. 2000. “Nemzeti egyenjogúsítás”. Kormányzati nemzetiségpolitika Magyarországon 1849–1860. [Making national partnership. Governmental nationality politics in Hungary, 1849–1860]. Budapest: Osiris. Deák Ferenc beszédei. 1903. [Speeches of Ferenc Deák] (Coll. Manó Kónyi). 6 volumes. 2nd ed. Budapest: Franklin. Dénes, Iván Zoltán. 1983. ‘The political role of Hungary’s nineteenth century conservatives and how they saw themselves’, The Historical Journal, 26, 845–65. ———. 1989. Közüggyé emelt kiváltságôrzés. A magyar konzervatívok szerepe és értékvilága az 1840-es években. [Protection of privileges as a public cause. The role and value system of the Hungarian conservatives in the 1840s] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1993. ‘The value systems of liberals and conservatives in Hungary, 1830–1848,’ The Historical Journal, 36, 825–50. ———, ed. 1993. Szabadság és nemzet. Liberalizmus és nacionalizmus Közép- és Kelet-Európában [Liberty and nation. Liberalism and nationalism in Central and East Europe.] Budapest: Gondolat. ———. 2001. Európai mintakövetés-nemzeti öncélúság. Értékvilág és identitáskeresés a 19–20. századi Magyarországon. [Adoption of European models vs. national self-centeredness. Values and identities in the 19th–20th centuries] Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. ———. Kossuth-images and their contexts, 1849–2005. www.bibomuhely.hu. ———, ed. 2004. A bûnbaktól a realista lényeglátóig. A magyar politikai és tudományos diskurzusok Kossuth-képei, 1849–2002. [From the scapegoat to the realist democratic politician. Kossuth-images in the Hungarian political and scholarly discourses, 1849–2002]. Budapest: Argumentum. Dessewffy Aurél összes mûvei. 1887. [Collected works] (Ed. József Ferenczy). Budapest: Franklin.

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Dessewffy, Emil. 1843. Parlagi eszmék, igénytelen nézetek, szerénytelen tervek a függô kérdések és az ország gyûlése körül. [Boorish ideas, fickle views, immodest plans about the unsettled questions and the diet] Pest: Landerer. Ellenôr. Politicai zsebkönyv. 1847. [Controller. Political manual] a Pesti Ellenzéki Kör megbízásából szerkeszté Bajza (József). Germany (Leipzig, Wigand). Eötvös, József. 1841. Kelet népe és a Pesti Hírlap. [The People of the East, and Pesti Hírlap] Pest: Landerer. ———. 1846. Reform. Leipzig: Wigand. ———. 1978. Reform és hazafiság. [Reform and patriotism] (Ed., annot. István Fenyô). 2 volumes. Budapest: Magyar Helikon. ———. 1996–1998. The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and their Impact on the State. Translated, edited and annotated with an introductory essay by D. Mervyn Jones. 2 volumes. Boulder, CO, Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research & Publications–Columbia University Press. Erdmann, Gyula. 1989. Zemplén vármegye reformellenzéke 1830–1836. [The reformist opposition in Zemplén county] Miskolc: Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén Megyei Levéltár, Kazinczy Társulat. Erdôdy, Gábor. 1988. A magyar kormányzat európai látóköre 1848-ban. [The European horizon of the Hungarian government in 1848] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1993. A 19. századi német liberalizmus. [19th century German liberalism]. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó. ———. 1998. Kényszerpályán. A magyar külpolitikai gondolkodás 1849-ben. [On a forced course. Hungarian foreign political ideas in 1849] Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó. ———. ‘Behódolás vagy nemzeti önvédelem. Kossuth Lajos és az 1848. szeptemberi válság.’ [Submission of national self-defence. Kossuth and the crisis in September 1848] Magyar Szemle, 2002/7–8. 39–65. Fenyô, István. 1997. A centralisták. Egy liberális csoport a reformkori Magyarországon. [The centralists. A liberal group in the Hungary of the Reform Era] Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó. Gángó, Gábor. 1999. Eötvös József az emigrációban. [József Eötvös in emigration] Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó. Gergely, András. 1972. Széchenyi eszmerendszerének kialakulása. [The evolution of Széchenyi’s system of ideas] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1982. Egy gazdaságpolitikai alternatíva a reformkorban. A fiumei vasút. [An economic political alternative in the Reform Era. The railway to Fiume] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1987. Egy nemzetet az emberiségnek. Tanulmányok a magyar reformkorról és 1848-ról. [A nation for mankind. Studies about the Hungarian Reform Era and 1848] Budapest: Magvetô Könyvkiadó. ———. 1989. Áruló vagy áldozat? István, az utolsó magyar nádor rejtélye. [Traitor or victim? The riddle of Stephan, the last Hungarian palatine] Budapest: Helikon Kiadó. ———. 1990. ‘Liberalizmus és nemzet. Eötvös József és a Habsburgok az 1840-es években.’ [Liberalism and nation. József Eötvös and the Habsburgs in the 1840s] Világosság, 1. pp. 1–8. ———. 2001. 1848-ban hogy is volt? Tanulmányok Magyarország és KözépEurópa 1848/49-es történetébôl. [How was it in 1848? Studies in the history of Hungary and Central Europe in 1848/49] Budapest: Osiris.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 193 ———. 2002. ‘Kossuth nemzetiségi politikája 1847–1853.’ [Kossuth’s nationality policy] Tiszatáj, 9. pp. 78–84. Gorove, István. 1842. Nemzetiség, jelenünk szempontjából. [Nationality, from the point of view of the present] Pest: Heckenast. H. Balázs, Éva. 1967. Berzeviczy Gergely, a reformpolitikus (1763–1795). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1987. Bécs és Pest-Buda a régi századvégen. 1765–1800. [Vienna and Budapest at the end of the 18th century] Budapest: Magvetô Könyvkiadó. Hajnal, István. 1957, 1987. A Batthyány kormány külpolitikája. [The foreign policy of the Batthyány government] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, Gondolat Kiadó. Hajnóczy József közjogi-politikai munkái. 1958. [József Hajnóczy’s works in political law and politics] (Ed. Andor Csizmadia) Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Hajnóczy József. 1998. (Selected, edited and annotated by János Poór). Magyar szabadelvûek. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. Haller, Carl Ludwig von. 1816–1834. Restauration der Staatswissenschaft oder Theorie des natürlich-geselligen Zustands; der Chimare des künstlich-bürgerlichen entgegengesetzt. 5 volumes. Winterthur: Steiner. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1952. Zur Philosophie der Geschichte. 2 volumes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Hermann, Róbert. 2002. Kossuth Lajos és kora. [Kossuth and his age] Budapest: Pannonica. Janowski, Maciej. 2004. Polska my√l liberalna do 1918 roku. Spoleczny Instiytut Wydawniczy Znak, Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego, Kraków–Warszasza, 1998, in English: Idem: Polish liberal thought before 1918. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press. Jászi, Oscar, 1971, (1929). The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jedlicki, Jerzy. 1986. ‘The Image of America in Poland, 1776–1945’. Reviews in American History, December. 669–686. ———. 1999. A Suburb of Europe. Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press. Kállay, Ferenc. 1842. ‘Magyar és szláv ügy feletti vitatkozások. Wesselényi Miklós báró vétója.’ [Dispute about the Hungarian and Slavic cause. Baron Miklós Wesselényi’s veto] Világ, 31 December 1842. ———. 1843. ‘A Szózat kritikai bírálatja.’ [A criticism of Szózat] Pest, 1843. ———. 1845. ‘Jellemrajzok az alkotmányos élet s kormányrendszerek körébôl.’ [Types of constitutional life and governments] 11 parts. I. Anglia (I–II.), II. Franciaország (I–II), A porosz liberálisok. [The Prussian liberals], Északamerikai állapotok. [Situation in North America] Nemzeti Újság, 7, 9, 11, 12 September, 9, 21, 23 October 1845. ———. 1847. ‘A dolgozó néposztály állapota Angliában jelen társadalmi állásunkhoz intôleg felmutatva.’ [The state of the working class in England, compared as a warning to our current social condition] 2 parts. Nemzeti Újság, 30 April, 4 May 1847. Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaud, ed. 1972. Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus. 2 volumes. Freiburg: Verlag Rombach. Kemény, Zsigmond. 1843–1844. Korteskedés és ellenszerei. [Canvassing and its remedies] 2 volumes. Kolozsvár: Királyi Lyceum Nyomda.

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Kis, János. 1997. Az állam semlegessége. [The neutrality of the state] Budapest: Atlantisz. ———. 2004. A politika mint erkölcsi probléma [Politics as a moral problem]. Budapest: Irodalom Kft. Kosáry, Domokos. 1994. A Görgey-kérdés története. [A history of the Görgey question] 2 volumes. Budapest: Osiris. ———. 1999. Magyarország és a nemzetközi politika 1848-49-ben. [Hungary and the international politics in 1848–49] Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete–História Könyvtár. ———. 2001. A magyar és európai politika történetébôl. Tanulmányok. [From the history of Hungarian and European politics. Studies] Budapest: Osiris. ———. 2002. Kossuth Lajos a reformkorban. [Kossuth in the Reform Era]. Second, expanded edition. Budapest: Osiris. (First edition: Budapest: Antiqua, 1946). Kossuth Lajos. 1841. Felelet gróf Széchenyi Istvánnak, Kossuth Lajostól. [Lajos Kossuth’s answer to István Széchenyi] Pest: Landerer. ———. Kossuth Lajos összes munkái VI. Ifjúkori iratok – Törvényhatósági tudósítások. 1961. [Collected works. Youthful writings. Municipal records] (Ed. István Barta). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. Kossuth Lajos összes munkái XI. Kossuth Lajos az utolsó rendi országgyûlésen 1847/48. 1951. [Collected works of Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth at the last feudal diet of 1847/48] (Ed., pref. István Barta). Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. Kossuth Lajos üzenetei. 1994. [The messages of Lajos Kossuth] Ed. György Szabad. Budapest: IKVA. Kölcsey Ferenc összes mûvei. 1960. [Complete works] (Ed. József Szauder and Mrs. József Szauder). 3 volumes. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó. Kovács, Ferenc, ed. 1894. Az 1843/44-dik országgyûlési alsótábla kerületi üléseinek naplója. [Records of the district sessions of the lower house of the diet convened in 1843/44], 6 volumes. Budapest: Franklin Társulat. Oeuvres complétes de Joseph de Maistre. 6 volumes. Lyon–Paris, 1884–1887. Vitte et Perussel. Molnár, András, ed. 1998. Az Ellenzéki nyilatkozat és a kortársak. [The Opposition memorandum and the contemporaries]. Commemorative session. Zalaegerszeg, June 7, 1997. Zalaegerszeg: Zalaegerszeg Liberal Circle. Müller, Adam. 1931. Vom Geiste der Gemeinschaft. Elemente der Staatskunst, Theorie des Geldes. (Coll., pref. Friedrich Bülow). Leipzig: Fischer. Pajkossy, Gábor, ed. 1999. Kossuth Lajos. Magyar szabadelvûek. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poór, János. 1988. Kényszerpályák nemzedéke 1795–1815. [The generation of forced orbits], Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó. Pulszky, Ferenc. 1842. Centralizáció. Pesti Hírlap, 10, 13, 17, 20 February 1842. R. Várkonyi, Ágnes. 1973. A pozitivista történetszemlélet a magyar történetírásban. [The positivist view of history in Hungarian historiography] 2 volumes. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Redlich, Joseph. 1920–1926. Das Österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem. 3 volumes. Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag ⁄ Dr. Peter Reinhold.

Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives 195 Ruggiero, Guido de. 1961 (1959). The History of European Liberalism. Beacon Hill, Boston: Beacon Press. (First published by Oxford University Press, 1927). Savigny, Friedrich Carl von. 1840. Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Reichtswissenschaft. Heidelberg: Mohr. Sheehan, James J. 1993 (1991). German History, 1770–1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999 (1978). German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Humanity Books. Skinner, Quentin. 1998. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szabad, György. 1967. Forradalom és kiegyezés válaszútján. (1860–61). [On the crossroads of revolution and compromise] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1971. ‘Eötvös József a politika útjain.’ [József Eötvös on the path of politics] Századok, 3–4, pp. 658–669. ———. 1975. ‘Kossuth az Amerikai Egyesült Államok politikai berendezkedésérôl.’ [Kossuth about the political establishment of the United States of America] Századok, 3–4, pp. 551–573. ———. 1977. Kossuth politikai pályája ismert és ismeretlen megnyilatkozásai tükrében. [Kossuth’s political career in the light of his known and unknown manifestations] Kossuth Könyvkiadó–Magyar Helikon, Budapest. ———. 1979. Az önkényuralom kora 1849–1867 [The age of absolutism] Magyarország története tíz kötetben. 6/1–2. 1848–1890. 6/1. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1985. Miért halt meg Teleki László? [Why did László Teleki die?] Budapest: Helikon Kiadó. ———. 2002. Kossuth irányadása. [The course Kossuth staked out] Budapest: Válasz Könyvkiadó. Szabó, Miklós. 1989. Politikai kultúra Magyarországon 1896–1986 [Political culture in Hungary 1896–1986]. Selected Studies. Medvetánc könyvek. Budapest: Atlantisz program. ———. 2003. Újkonzervativizmus és jobboldali radikalizmus (1867–1918). [History of New Conservatism and Right Wing Radicalism]. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. Széchenyi, István. 1830. Hitel. [Credit] Pest: Landerer. ———. 1831. Világ vagy is felvilágosító töredékek némi hiba s elôítélet eligazítására. [Light, or enlightening fragments to correct some mistake and prejudice] Pest: Landerer. ———. 1833. Stádium. [State] Leipzig: Wigand. ———. 1841. A Kelet népe. [The people of the East] Pest: Landerer. ———. 1925. A Kelet népe. [The people of the East] (Ed., pref. Zoltán Ferenczi). Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat. ———. 1927, 1930. Gróf Széchenyi István összes munkái. VI. Gróf Széchenyi István írói és hírlapi vitája Kossuth Lajossal. [Count István Széchenyi’s polemics in books and the press with Lajos Kossuth] (Ed., pref. Gyula Viszota). 2 volumes. Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat. Szécsen, Antal. 1845. ‘Honoráciorok.’ [Honoratiores] 2 parts. Budapesti Híradó, 12, 15 August 1845.

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Szekfû, Gyula. 2000. Valahol utat vesztettünk. [We lost the way somewhere] (Pref., annot., ed. Gábor Szigethy). Budapest: Holnap Könyvkiadó. Tamás, Gáspár Miklós. 1998. ‘Eötvös: a nyugat-keleti liberális.’ [Eötvös: a westeastern liberal] Világosság, 1998/5–6. pp. 3–78. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trócsányi, Zsolt. 1965. Wesselényi Miklós. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Urbán, Aladár. 1986. Batthyány Lajos miniszterelnöksége. [The premiership of Lajos Batthyány] Budapest: Magvetô Könyvkiadó. Varga, János. 1971. A jobbágyfelszabadítás kivívása 1848-ban. [The abolition of serfdom in 1848] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1980. Deák Ferenc és az elsô magyar polgári büntetôrendszer tervezete. [Ferenc Deák and the plan for the first Hungarian civilian penal system] (Zalai Gyûjtemény, 15.). Zalaegerszeg. ———. 1980–1981. Megye és haladás a reformkor derekán (1840–1843), [County and progress in the middle of the Reform Era] In: Somogy megye múltjából. Levéltári évkönyv. 11–12. (Ed. József Kanyar). Kaposvár, 1. pp. 177– 243, 2. pp. 155–194. ———. 1983. Kereszttûzben a Pesti Hírlap. Az ellenzéki és a középutas liberalizmus elválása 1841–42-ben. [The Pesti Hírlap between two fires. Separation of the opposition and middle-of-the-road liberalism in 1841–42] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ———. 1993. A Hungarian Quo Vadis. Political Ideas and Conceptions in the Early 1840s. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. (Hungarian original: Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982). Vörös, Károly. 1985. ‘The Image of America in Hungarian Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century.’ In Etudes Historiques Hongroises, 3 volumes. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. vol. 2. pp. 647–662. Wesselényi, Miklós. 1833. Balítéletekrôl. [On prejudiced] Bucharest (Leipzig: Wigand). ———. 1843. Szózat a magyar és szláv nemzetiség ügyében. [Address on the cause of the Hungarian and Slavic nationalities] Leipzig: Wigand. New edition: Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1992. XX: Helyzetünk s a legsürgetôbb reformok. 27 parts. [Our situation and the most pressing reforms] Budapesti Híradó, 25, 27 October, 13, 22, 27, 29 November, 24 December 1846, 1, 3, 19, 26, 31 January, 5, 9, 26 February, 2 March, 4, 7, 14, 18, 21, 23, 27, 28, 30 May, 23, 25 July 1847. Závodszky, Géza. 1992. Az Amerika-motívum és a polgárosodó Magyarország. [The motif of America and Hungary on the way of embourgeoisement] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

The Liberalism of the Hungarian Nobility (1825–1910) MIKLÓS SZABÓ

I. The first politically organized force to make a conscious effort to implement a systematically designed reform program in order to promote the rise of the middle-class society in Hungary was Austrian absolutism, which waged a serious political war against conservative Hungarian elements, the Church, and the landed nobility, in whose interest it was to maintain feudalism. Strange as it may seem, this was entirely logical. The more rigid and fixed the political or social system one tries to oppose or fight against, the more important it is to persuade and have the backing of those at a higher level of the political system, without whose assistance political resistance will prove too strong. When French political and social tensions became too great, and revolution loomed, it was an aristocrat, the Marquis de Lafayette, who brought a new political model from America. However, to transform the family doctor of the Comte d’Artois into a “friend of the people,” or a recording secretary of the parliamentary debates on the “incorruptible,” was another question. It needed an actual revolution, a revolution which such people would never have launched themselves. The French Revolution was a turning point in history in many other respects. It was the first time, for example, when the different political forces made an alliance to bring about the bourgeois transformation of society and turned against the absolutist system. It was during the French Revolution that absolutism took a sharp turn and changed from being the promoter of economic and social modernity into the main enemy of social progress. In Hungary it was in the 1820s that the different political forces adopted the struggle for the modernization of the country. The enemy was the Viennese absolutist system of the Holy Alliance. This bore little resemblance to its predecessor, enlightened Josephinist absolutism. This time the pattern of resistance was the same in Hungary as everywhere else in Europe: the political forces striving for bourgeois development and progress started to organize themselves into an opposition. This emanated from the lower tiers of society. Immediately, an intriguing question emerges: what was the relationship between the new and the old opposition? How did the new enemies of absolutism relate to the feudal

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opposition which had fought against Vienna for its constitutional rights for centuries? Did they exist together in a complicated but close symbiosis, or did feudal absolutism change into liberal anti-absolutism, or was it perhaps the other way round? It may be that the traditional policy of grievances put on new, fashionable clothes with all the modern accessories of liberalism and democracy in the new French post-revolutionary style of the time. The progressive absolutism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II certainly underwent radical change and under the reign of Emperor Francis had become reactionary absolutism. Did the opposition go through a similar but opposite change, as in a mirror? Did the old feudal reactionary policy of grievances change into a progressive anti-absolutist opposition? In the Hungary of the 1830s–1840s, was there a feudal revolt or a bourgeois revolution in the making?

II. Are resistance of the estates (Stände) and bourgeois revolutionarism really antagonistic categories? Do they really exclude each other completely, as we might suppose if we read Hungarian political literature? This supposition seems to be correct only if we do not make any distinction between the royal centralization of the Middle Ages and absolutism as such. Absolutism, compared to previous regimes, had two new features: a regular standing army and a relatively efficient tax-raising mechanism. Absolutism did not want to have to concentrate its revenue-raising efforts on a single prey. It wanted subjects with high incomes—subjects who could consistently pay high taxes. The same groups who had once been expelled from the empires by the ‘great rulers’ in order to acquire their fortunes as windfalls were now invited back by the absolutist ruler. Frederick I, for example, arranged for the settlement in Berlin of well-trained craftsmen and Huguenots who had emigrated after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. Maria Theresa arranged the settlement of Swabian farmers with a high level of agricultural technology in Hungary and Catherine the Great encouraged German farmers to settle along the Volga and in Bukovina. The old-fashioned, looting form of centralization lasted much longer than we might have expected: Henry VIII in England and the Habsburgs in Hungary in the early seventeenth century reigned in this fashion. Leopold I was the first Habsburg ruler who established absolutist methods in Austria. His predecessors, Rudolph and Ferdinand III, still used the old-fashioned centralizing techniques. In the most developed countries there was a typical pattern of bourgeois development: usually, when the country moved away from the old type of centralization towards absolutism, the social forces organized

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within the framework of the feudal political structure used all possible means of feudal resistance against the developing absolutism. The nobility was usually afraid of losing its political power, and the bourgeois classes were reluctant to pay increasingly high taxes. In two out of every three cases, this social resistance was also accompanied by regional resistance: the peripheral territories, which had autonomy within the feudal framework, tried to get rid of the burden of central taxation. The war of independence in the Netherlands, the English Revolution, and the American War of Independence all started within the framework of an estate system to prevent the development of absolutism. (The case of America is not so clear-cut at first sight, but in the final analysis it is obvious.) In all these countries resistance of estates, as a kind of archaic permanent revolution, grew into a bourgeois revolution. Even the French Revolution started in this way, with the summoning of the Estates-General. At the same time, there was a very important difference: by that time, the estate system had become an empty political framework in France. When the Estates-General was called, it did not mean the beginning of absolutism. Just the opposite: it meant the overthrowing of the most developed form of absolutism, which served as a pattern for most European countries. After the Fronde, Louis XIV definitively broke the estates in a political sense. Feudalism in France at this time still existed, but there were no estates. For the tiers état, which made its first important political appearance at the Estates-General, absolutism and the landowning nobility were enemies. In Hungary the situation was, to a certain extent, similar. The task was not to prevent the development of absolutism, because absolutism was quite well developed. At the same time, this absolutism could not abolish the Hungarian estates, even after the suppression of the Rákóczi revolt. The feudal and bourgeois estates formed an alliance to fight against a well-developed absolutism which had earlier pursued largescale modernization. This alliance was, of course, very different from the type of association these two estates would have formed if they had simply endeavored to prevent the development of absolutism. It is an intriguing question as to whether we can talk about an alliance at all in this case: can the political forces striving for a bourgeois society make common cause with the landowning nobility without having the supporting bourgeois classes behind them? Can the non-existent bourgeoisie temporarily be substituted by another social stratum until the bourgeoisie is formed by the political actions of that same social stratum? The latter must originally have belonged to the old order and achieved such a position within it that it could serve as an Archimedean point. In Hungary there was a strengthening political revival in the 1820s. In 1825, there was an uprising in St. Petersburg. This was the first and only feudal uprising, and the first and only bourgeois revolution in

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Russia. Its perpetrators were army officers, a part of the old world which turned against the old world. Although they were few in number, they were powerful enough to serve as the Archimedean point of the old world. The Hungarian situation was radically different. This time political resistance was not the prerogative of a small elite group, as in the time of the ‘Bodyguard literati’ and the so-called Martinovics conspiracy at the end of the eighteenth century. This time the landowning nobility, the old ruling class, felt that by turning against absolutism it could retain power under the new, developing political regime. The landowners who supported the reforms were responsive to liberal ideas, supposing that they could transform themselves into a modern bourgeois class. As liberals, they succeeded in realizing a political metamorphosis. After giving up their aristocratic privileges, they really became a bourgeois-type ruling class, even if economically they played a very similar role, cultivating their lands in the same old fashion and not changing their lifestyle very much. But the liberalism of the nobility was more than that. It was a special ideology which implied more than the simple fact that the landowning nobility, without their privileges, constituted part of the same bourgeois ruling class as the merchants, bankers, and factory owners. It assumed that the landowning nobility was in a better position to convey liberal ideas and to organize and build up a new society and political order according to the principles of liberalism than the bourgeoisie of ‘mobile capital.’ The year 1848 created the political myth necessary for the liberalism of the nobility: that the nobility had given up its privileges voluntarily. After 1849 and 1867 this myth served as a justification for the old ruling class to claim to be the ruling power in the new bourgeois world. It served as a justification for the assertion that the old landowner was better and more virtuous than the new. It was relatively late, in 1884, that Gusztáv Beksics set forth his ideas about the Hungarian landowning nobility as a Hungarian tiers état in a political leaflet entitled Társadalmunk és nemzeti hivatásunk (Our society and national mission). When Beksics talked about the landowning nobility he meant only the landed gentry, not the aristocracy. His logic was as follows: in Hungary the landed gentry played the same role in society as the tiers état in France. What Beksics called tiers état was equivalent to the juste milieu or middle class in developed Western countries, meaning the occupation of a middle position in society in the material, social, and political senses. The landed gentry occupied the same middle position between the underprivileged poor and the highly privileged magnates as the bourgeoisie did between the working class and the feudal aristocracy. Feudalism as such was the society of the aristocracy. Compared to them the landed gentry was only a quasi-bourgeoisie. Economically they were

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independent, and they were obviously not paupers, but at the same time they never had significant fortunes which could have given them dominance over other groups. Socially they were not as distinguished as the counts, but they were not completely without noble rank, as the peasants, for example, obviously were. Politically they represented the balance of power between the two extremes of society. When Beksics gave this description of the middle class, absolutism was long dead. The central authority was pursuing a responsible administration and the Ausgleich (the Compromise of 1867) was in operation. Despotism was no longer the main target of the liberals’ attacks. Instead, they were fighting for a politically balanced state mechanism and social system. Beksics re-interpreted his originally morphological analogy between the Western bourgeoisie and the Hungarian landed gentry as a functional analogy. Much later, another Hungarian thinker, Gyula Szekfû, re-invented the same idea in his book Három nemzedék (Three generations). He also redeveloped the idea of the landed gentry as some kind of quasi-bourgeoisie. According to Szekfû, the landed gentry took over the role of the bourgeoisie in the Reform Age, and twenty years later, in 1848, they adopted the liberal ideology. Szekfû claimed that the receiving agents (the landed gentry) did not change the character of the adopted ideology: liberalism remained the same as in its original Western form. By taking over liberal ideas, the Hungarian landed gentry lost its old political and social function and became a bourgeois class in every respect. Szekfû did not consider this as a virtuous act; for him this metamorphosis represented the historical ‘fall’ of the landed gentry. József Révai ‘corrected’ and shifted the emphasis of Szekfû’s theory by adding the necessary economic ingredients of Stalinist-type Marxism. In this re-interpretation, the “productive landed gentry” was the conveyor of Hungarian bourgeois development. The landed gentry showed significant bourgeois characteristics even before the emancipation of the serfs, and it was in their basic economic interest to fight for bourgeois transformation and to replace non-productive serf labor with free wage labor. Révai believed that the magnates, the great nobility, the owners of enormous latifundia did not share this economic interest; this is illogical, since the large estates were much more productive than the medium-sized or small ones. If the Marxist theorist had taken this into consideration, however, the theory would have lacked the indispensable element of the ruling class, against which the ‘class conscious’, ‘progressive’ landed gentry could fight. Thus, in addition to the economic scheme, Révai had to invent a class-struggle one, according to which the big landowners were very reactionary, the medium landowners slightly reactionary, the smallholders progressive, and the paupers very progressive. As we have seen, this kind of liberalism considered the landed gentry to be bourgeois. This view survived for a long time, and very different

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trends of thought accepted it. According to gentry liberalism, the landed gentry was a suitable force to build up the type of civil society that classical liberalism aimed at. But gentry liberalism went even further, claiming that the civil society it would establish would be better than any alternative. Their explanation was as follows: the landed gentry had an independent material existence, as a consequence of which they were the safest guarantees of a socially, economically, and politically independent society. Furthermore, the gentry were deeply committed to the principle of independence because their financial ‘autonomy’ went back many centuries. Their political commitment to independence differentiated them from capitalists in general: factory owners, financiers, and merchants, being much more closely connected to current financial circumstances, were more dependent on the economic policy of the existing political power. The archetype of this mentality was the proud and defiant gentry, which was brave enough to oppose even the king and the court banker, and which provided the monarch with credit and made the king dependent. All these liberal issues were closely connected with the national question in Hungary. The landowner usually had an emotional commitment to his land. This commitment to the ancestral land made him national par excellence and a good candidate to serve as the patriotic ruling class, whereas the typical capitalist was considered cosmopolitan. ‘Mobile capital’ was international: the banker, the merchant, and the manufacturer invested their capital wherever it was expected to be the most profitable. Business was cosmopolitan—its scope of activity embraced the whole world. In the 1880s, when the developing bourgeois class was basically coterminous with Jewish merchants in Hungary, these thoughts, although conceived earlier, took on an anti-Semitic connotation. The agrarian slogan “Those who own the land, own the country” expressed essentially the same idea and gave voice to the same anti-Semitic feelings. Thus, according to gentry liberalism, the landowning nobility constituted a more autochthonous and more stable civil society than did the bourgeoisie. They also believed that the landed gentry constituted a firmer base against the government than the traditional capitalist class. During its centuries-long history, the landowning nobility had a great deal of experience in resisting the government. As a modern bourgeois class they could use the legacy of their feudal resistance in an effective way. What the ideology of classical liberalism considered to be the core principle and the most important and self-assertive path to civil society— the minimization of the state—was in fact a goal that its noble ancestors had pursued for centuries in a ‘natural’ fashion. The landowning nobility, which had organized itself into an estate, would use military

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force to restrict the authority of the central power, whereas its bourgeois successors mostly tried to do the same merely by minimizing the budget. But even this second method was of feudal origin. The feudal parliament was not an exclusive legislature—the ruler had more rights in this field—but it was the exclusive forum for voting on taxation. Hungarian gentry liberalism had another legacy to contribute to the restriction of the central power and the minimization of the state: the institution of municipal autonomy. Besides the restriction of the budget, classical liberalism considered administrative autonomy the second most important means of restraining the power of the central authority and minimizing state interference. A classic example of local autonomy was Tocqueville’s America, where elected laypersons performed the basic civil service jobs in the villages, without any bureaucracy or official administration, as if the dream of Godwin, essentially the father of liberal anarchism, had come true: civil society without a state. The Hungarian county inherited several institutions of administrative autonomy by means of which it was able effectively to restrain central power. The county general assemblies had the right to enact—that is, to debate—national laws, giving them a say on all the important political issues of the day. They had the right to pass resolutions, which they could send to other counties, on these issues. The county system was characterized by a kind of horizontal structure; as a consequence, if the landed gentry was able to substitute the non-existent bourgeoisie and fulfill its mission (at least its political mission), its institutions could serve as powerful means with which to minimize the state in a liberal sense. Gentry liberalism was not a uniquely Hungarian phenomenon. It was known in many other countries at a similar stage of development. What is more, it was ideologically present even in some Western countries. Maurice Joly’s famous political leaflet against the Second Empire, published after his emigration to Brussels in 1864, also included references to this type of liberalism. The work took the form of a fictitious dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli in the afterworld. Machiavelli was the protagonist of the world of Napoleon III, and Montesquieu gave voice to the opinions of the author, who stood for the liberal program and belief in a constitutional monarchy. His liberal ideas had a number of elements that were similar to Hungarian gentry liberalism. Joly– Montesquieu claimed that the landowners would be the most effective force in the fight against despotism. The modern paternalist dictatorships brought back memories of feudal resistance even in the most developed social and political structures. Nevertheless, gentry liberalism was much more typical of less developed countries, and not only in Eastern and Central Europe. It emerged as an influential ideology not only in Hungary and Poland, but in almost every other country in the region, and even in other parts of Europe.

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Liberalism in nineteenth-century Spain (where the concept of liberalism originated), so-called ‘Christinos’ liberalism, was of gentry origin, as was the liberalism of the Risorgimento in Italy. It cannot be an accident that the historical influence of Garibaldi and Kossuth was quite similar. After the euphoric cult of the nineteenth century, the thoughts and views of both politicians met with a far colder reception or even sank into oblivion after 1945. In the nineteenth century, the most important social basis of the ruling Liberal Party in Italy consisted of the owners of the large Southern estates, and the parliament soon became the institution of their rule, as a result of which it became an object of hatred for the Northern industrial bourgeoisie. The sharp criticisms of the parliamentary system made by Pareto, Mosca, and Michels sprang from this soil: after the golden age of Italian liberalism, the Northern bourgeoisie first tried to organize itself into a political force in its struggle against gentry liberalism, and launched its first important attack against the Liberal parliament of the Southern nobility. Another country in the East-Central European region where gentry liberalism managed to become deeply rooted was Bohemia. When Palack§ was working on the theory of Czech liberalism, like his Hungarian and Polish counterparts he relied heavily on the nobility, which he saw as providing a strong basis for republican government and as something rooted in the tradition of the feudal Hussite state of the pre-Weissenberg (White Mountain) period. Historical constitutional law was similarly an inherent part of Hungarian, Polish, and Czech liberalism. It was also part of Czech liberal thought, despite the fact that the main social basis of liberalism in Bohemia was the artisan- and merchanttype of bourgeoisie, rather than the landed gentry. The aristocracy of Bohemian origin oriented itself towards the Habsburg court and was an integral part of the Austrian aristocracy. Most of the time they did not profess a Czech identity, or if they did, only to a very slight degree. The Bohemian lesser nobility, who had a strong similarity to the Hungarian gentry and the Polish szlachta, was completely extinguished after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Hungarian bourgeois radicalism, which started as an attempt to develop bourgeois liberalism in Hungary, became fiercely antagonistic to gentry liberalism; indeed, it was in the struggle with gentry liberalism in Hungary that the tenets of bourgeois radicalism evolved into their final form. In Bohemia the whole process was very different in this respect: bourgeois radicalism assimilated the historicism and estate-based constitutionalism of gentry liberalism. The works of Emmanuel Rádl, for example—who had a lot in common with the Hungarian bourgeois radical thinkers—are full of references to the ideas of gentry liberalism. This type of historicism, which basically referred to the ideas of constitutional law and was a trend of gentry liberalism, also emerged in the Austrian

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part of the monarchy, although the context within which it appeared was not what one would call liberal. In 1910 political circles in the Tyrol demanded that Emperor Francis Joseph visit the province in his capacity as a Count of the Tyrol. (By the same token, he could have visited British Palestine as King of Jerusalem—accompanied by the Hungarian Palatine, of course, because King of Jerusalem was a title that belonged to the King of Hungary.) Although gentry liberalism was not the same as liberalism as such, which usually developed on a bourgeois social basis, it was an authentic formulation of liberalism, and not a conservative ideology merely disguising itself as liberalism under pressure of the ‘spirit of the age.’ As far as its exact place within liberal ideology in general is concerned, gentry liberalism developed from the tenets of classical liberalism rather than from continental liberalism. In contrast to the latter, which was rooted in the anti-feudal, modernising ideas of absolutism—especially enlightened absolutism—classical liberalism built up its philosophy from the anti-absolutist ideologies of the feudal estates. The main issues which Hungarian gentry liberalism sought to tackle were typical of classical liberalism: civil society and the traditional large estates as its ideal base; state minimisation and feudal resistance as the basic form of state minimisation; and administrative autonomy as a means of restraining central power. Gentry liberalism regarded the Hungarian county as a miniature model of state sovereignty, the existence of which would automatically restrict the sovereignty of the government, which had inherited absolutist features. A link to the Anglo-Saxon version of liberalism was provided by the idealization of customary law, which gentry liberalism thought to be the same as gentry traditions. Continental liberalism followed a different line. In France and Germany, for example, strict codification was considered to be the best guarantee of freedom and justice. They tried to ‘fill in the gaps’ between existing laws by putting everything under law, so avoiding the possibility of grievance or injustice. In these countries codified laws were believed to be the best means of restricting the authority of the government, which tended to use more and more absolutist methods. Hungarian gentry liberalism, following the logic of English liberalism, assumed that complete control of society by laws would only restrict the freedom of its citizens. During the Bach period in Hungary, gentry liberalism became modernized. This new, modern liberalism was represented by such names as Kemény, Eötvös, and Madách. These thinkers gave up the dichotomy of ‘civil society versus despotism’; for them, the antagonism of crowd and individual was a much more important problem. In their view, the crowd meant conformity in thought and lifestyle. The crowd is always opinionated and prejudiced, its judgements purely emotional; it does

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not tolerate independent opinions. The crowd’s conformity and prejudices terrorize the individual. This new problem emerged from the fact that in the most developed Western societies liberalism had finally gained a definitive victory over absolutism: instead of the despotism and autocracy of absolutist governments, the new enemy was democracy. The social vehicle of independent opinion is the materially independent individual. These financially independent individuals constitute a liberal political community. Those who are materially dependent must be excluded from the political community by means of property qualifications for voting. (Property qualifications were not, as one may think, a feudal remnant, but a form of liberal voting par excellence.) The democratic political community (which is no longer liberal), created as a result of universal suffrage, is a conglomerate of financially dependent citizens. In this political context, materially independent individuals are lost. Their independent opinions, supported and guaranteed by the independence of their financial position, are suppressed by the conformity and prejudice of mass opinion. Modern liberalism launched a serious war against this alleged terror of the ‘man of the street,’ who had become politically dominant as a result of the introduction of universal suffrage. The antagonism of crowd and individual appeared in many forms in the works of contemporary authors. In The Tragedy of Man Imre Madách gave a literary interpretation of the problem, while in The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century Eötvös approached the question from a theoretical point of view. Both authors seemed to live in an ivory tower, out of touch with the reality of real-life, neo-absolutist Hungary. During the autocracy and despotism of the neo-absolutist system, nothing seemed a more crucial political issue than the problem of absolutism. Still, neither Madách, Eötvös, nor Kemény responded to the most important topical issues. Since it was impossible to publish anything worthwhile about these problems, they turned their back on reality and drew inspiration from the ideas and problems of Western liberalism. Although they could not be up-to-date in Hungary, they could try to keep up with the most modern Western European liberal ideas. They were in synchrony with the English and French liberals. Hungarian problems did appear in Eötvös’ works in one way. He built up a system in accordance with the famous slogan of the French Revolution, with the difference that he replaced fraternity with nationhood, a clear reference to contemporary Hungary. (In any case, fraternity had always been rather vague and even at the time of the French Revolution it probably referred above all to the solidarity of nations and patriots.) Baron Zsigmond Kemény, the ‘Hungarian Balzac,’ applied the ideas of modern liberalism to the current Hungarian situation in his book Forradalom után (After the Revolution). He identified the 1848 revolutionaries, especially Kossuth, with democracy, and used the anti-

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democratic arguments of modern liberalism to criticize them. In his interpretation, during the revolution and war of independence, the real liberal ideas were represented by the peace party, which opposed the Declaration of Independence (14th April, 1849). Kemény belonged to this party at that time. Gentry liberalism in Hungary, and in all the other countries where it had a serious social impact, had one unique feature which made it different from both the English and the continental versions of classical liberalism, not to mention modern liberalism: wherever it emerged, the national issue was an inherent part of it. Gentry liberalism was always a form of nationalism, representing the national identity of these political communities.

III. The two classical figures of Hungarian liberalism, who laid the foundation of liberalism for the nobility, were István Széchenyi and Miklós Wesselényi. In the 1830s, during his first liberal period, Széchenyi wrote three books of fundamental importance: Hitel (Credit), Világ (Light), and Stádium (Stadium). In these works he essentially relied on the ideas of English classical liberalism, especially those of Bentham, the great utilitarian theorist and the last author of traditional classical liberalism in England. Széchenyi’s works centered on how to convince the aristocrats gradually to give up their privileges (principally in the form of a general and proportionate sharing of taxation). Another important concern was how bourgeois rationality could be made the main principle of society and the requisite conditions created for the development of a bourgeois economy (abolition of property entailment). The key elements of his program were civil society, bourgeois economics, and the minimization of the state. He intended to develop civil society by emancipating the serfs and abolishing the prerogatives of the nobility. He attacked two important noble privileges in particular: tax exemption and the law of entail, which he considered the primary cause of the country’s poverty, suggesting that its abolition would promote bourgeois development by providing healthier financial conditions. Although he regarded credit as the most important infrastructural prerequisite of bourgeois development, he also put great emphasis on modernization of the transport system, which he considered an indispensable condition for the development of trade. He urged the construction of railway lines and a permanent suspension bridge over the Danube connecting Buda and Pest, which would make the future Hungarian capital the commercial center of the country and the hub of its transportation system. He also pressed for the reg-

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ulation of the Danube and Tisza rivers, the improvement of Danube navigation, and the introduction of steam shipping on the Danube. The flood control plans for Hungary’s two main rivers laid the foundation for the expansion of agricultural production for generations to come. The minimization of the state was for him primarily a non-political concern; indeed, he was reluctant to use political or legislative means to achieve this goal. He was convinced that bourgeois social transformation could be realized by individuals, strictly within the limits of the private sphere. His anti-state attitude was also an anti-political one. Széchenyi’s social background offers the best explanation of the origin of his thoughts. He belonged to the aristocracy, and his liberalism represented the aristocratic version of the liberalism of the nobility. He thought the magnates to be the most suitable persons to accomplish his social program. The aristocracy had financial independence and all the material means to finance the implementation of his plans. The aristocracy was educated and civilized and an inherent part of European culture, which made it suitable for realizing the bourgeois social transformation he promoted. The only way, he thought, of realizing this transformation smoothly, without violence or serious clashes with the Viennese administration and the county nobility, was to keep control of events within the competence of the aristocracy. He did not consider the landed gentry as a possible candidate for the social basis of bourgeois development. He identified them with the gravaminalist opposition and the policy of grievances, which he regarded as outdated and reactionary, part of the feudal past which must be eliminated. The landed gentry could not become the agent of social progress for three reasons: they had neither money, culture, nor intelligence enough to serve as the agents of social change. His initiatives to introduce capitalist enterprise and bourgeois lifestyles were designed for the aristocracy, not the gentry, who were completely out of step with the times, and unsuited to become the new bourgeoisie in Hungary. Széchenyi wanted both enterprise and bourgeois social mores. He wanted to transform the ‘late baroque’ Hungarian magnates into an Englishtype aristocracy. That is why, in his first book, Lovakrúl (On Horses), he tried to popularize the lifestyle of the English aristocracy and suggested the introduction of horse races as capitalist enterprises. For the same reason, he established the National Casino as a Hungarian version of the English gentlemen’s club. When the gentry opposition appeared in the Diet with their liberal ideas in the 1840s, Széchenyi felt stranded somewhere between them and Vienna. It was at this time that he launched sharp attacks against the attitudes of the landed gentry in his political pamphlets A Kelet népe (People of the Orient) and Politikai programtöredékek (Fragments of a Political Program), this time criticizing them not so much for their feudal boorishness as for their Jacobinism.

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Although he hesitated, he finally chose the court and supported the aulic (court) party. The fact that the autocratic Metternich was the chancellor did not shake his resolve, nor his faith in the capability and willingness of the court to initiate and enforce reforms in the spirit of the enlightened absolutists Joseph II and Maria Theresa. He was convinced that the reform initiatives of the court would make it easier for Hungary to establish a bourgeois society with an aristocratic leadership. He did not believe that the gentry opposition would be capable of directing the country along this path. Széchenyi had put his finger on the most crucial issues facing Hungarian society at that time, one of which was undoubtedly the national question. Széchenyi’s views on this point were very different from those of gentry liberalism. His liberalism became fairly obscure on this question, being colored by conservative elements. He was afraid of national independence, the realization of which, he thought, would push the country further back from the civilized bourgeois world. For him the national issue basically meant the promotion and nourishing of Hungarian culture by nurturing the mother tongue and supporting the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Letters and Sciences. The liberalism of the landed gentry started to develop in the 1830s, but it was not until the 1840s that it became a determining factor in political life. The main theoretical and political figures who formulated and represented gentry liberalism were Miklós Wesselényi, Ferenc Deák and Lajos Kossuth. In contrast with Széchenyi and the aristocratic version of liberalism, gentry liberalism sought to realize bourgeois society in Hungary mainly by political means. In their view, bourgeois Hungary was tantamount to an independent nation-state. The main organizational base of this movement was the county. The political background of the gentry opposition in Parliament came from the county opposition factions, particularly from counties where the opposition was in the majority. The main goal of this type of liberalism was also the creation of a civil society, but instead of restricting themselves to the private sphere, as the aristocratics tended to do, they considered the opposition counties useful means for this purpose. This social stratum did not have the financial means to organize a civil society from bourgeois Hungary within the framework of private enterprise. Consequently, their only possibility was to organize themselves within a political framework. Kossuth and his political movement drew inspiration from various sources. The Rotteck-Welcker’s Staatslexikon, the handbook of German liberalism, was particularly important. Széchenyi, following the English pattern, was a supporter of free trade as far as the organization of international economic life was concerned. Kossuth and his followers professed a different conviction: they linked the problem of foreign trade

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with the political program of modernization, advocating the ideas of the German economist Friedrich List, and wanted to introduce tariff protection to stimulate Hungarian industrial development. The existence of an independent Hungarian state was indispensable for the realization of this plan. Kossuth’s modernization program was the economic and political manifestation of the same aim. Kossuth—and the political opposition which took his name—even endeavored to lay the economic foundation of a bourgeois society by political means. The National Protective Association (Országos Védegylet) sought to protect and revive domestic industry with the help of a political movement. They declared a boycott against Austrian manufactures, but also excluded the products of, for example, the Czech textile industry, saying that even Bohemia—part of the monarchy—was a foreign country, in the strict sense. They wanted to use political means in order to achieve their goals, one of which was to connect by railway the future Hungarian capital with the Adriatic port of Fiume, which would open up great opportunities for Hungarian foreign trade. Thus, the accusation that Kossuth and the liberal opposition led by him was insensitive to Hungary’s economic problems had no basis. Although the allegation that they wanted to solve every problem by political means, ignoring many economic solutions, was frequently voiced later, Kossuth, in contrast to Széchenyi, never counterposed economics and politics. He never tried to separate the two concepts or to favor one or the other. In fact, in his desire to solve economic problems by political means, Kossuth advocated a more realistic policy than Széchenyi: he thought it was a delusion to think that the self-regulating, free development of the economy would spontaneously ‘solve’ political problems. The basic assumption of this view is that if a society is prosperous, questions of power and political regime are of secondary importance. Therefore, if a particular political system makes it possible for a civil society to develop, it is acceptable almost per definitionem, whether absolutist or democratic. This view is not only incompatible with the principles of liberalism, but also unrealistic, for the simple reason that absolutism is thoroughly bureaucratic, striving to control everything. The maintenance of a comprehensive bureaucracy and a highly centralized and autocratic regime is usually extremely expensive, which obviously hampers development and has a negative influence on social prosperity. The other important fact is that the more developed an economy, the more it requires an adequate political system, one that is likely to adopt liberal or democratic parliamentary methods and less inclined to endure absolutist–bureaucratic restrictions. If this were not so, how could we explain the fact that the French bourgeoisie turned against the absolutism to which they were so indebted and instead made an alliance with social forces that subsequently smashed the absolutistic–bureaucratic system with the most radical, revolutionary means?

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It is undeniable that the main purpose of gentry-based liberalism was the political transformation of the country. In place of the feudal Diet it strove to establish a modern parliament, which would have its regular sessions in the administrative and political center of Hungary and whose members would be drawn from a relatively wide social basis. According to the gentry liberals’ plans, not only would the nobility have the right to vote, but also everyone else who was able to pay the franchise quota. They insisted on a government which was accountable to parliament and fought for universal civil rights and a free press. In contrast to their conservative opponents, who supported slower, more deliberate development, Kossuth and his followers wanted to realize their program of social transformation relatively quickly. He did not advocate revolution by any means—as his opponents, the conservatives and Széchenyi, claimed—but was determined to implement his program. He honestly believed in the power of reform, but he was ready to use revolutionary means if necessary. The aristocratic trend of liberalism was hostile towards the landed gentry and its liberal avant-garde. The landed gentry reckoned with the interests of the magnates when they designed their program of unity, assuming that the feudal past of the aristocracy that bound them to the fatherland would prove stronger than their attachment to the royal court. In fact, unlike the majority of the Czech aristocracy, most of the Hungarian magnates did not belong to the imperial aristocracy, which formed an ‘international’, unified social stratum around the court. The events of 1848 in Hungary justified Kossuth’s assumptions: most of the aristocracy joined the war of independence. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a third trend of ‘noble liberalism’ in Hungary. This centralist line was represented by Eötvös, Kemény, Trefort, László Szalay, and Móric Lukács. Whether the liberalism of this centralist group can really be regarded as a variety of ‘noble liberalism’ is questionable, however. Their philosophy originated from the continental version of bourgeois liberalism, which typically relied on the bourgeois tendencies of the absolutist regime, in contrast to the liberalism of the nobility, which grew out of the feudal struggle of the landowning nobility. They summarized and improved the ideas of enlightened absolutism, and developed them into a liberal world-view. They turned these ideas against the absolutist regime, which they thought had given up its enlightened sentiments and had become conservative and repressive. The absolutism of the Holy Alliance took the form of a police state, which used its repressive organs to defend privileges, in contrast to its enlightened predecessors who used their autocracy to restrict the privileges of the nobility and the church. While the previous regime somehow guaranteed freedom of thought, this new, repressive absolutism tried to suffocate any free thought through censorship. The

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typical social base of this liberalism was not the bourgeois class of craftsmen, merchants, and entrepreneurs, but the clerical workers of the absolutist system, who finally became liberals and turned against the regime which had produced them. The other important social base of the centralist group was the freelance professional classes, which lived and worked in the ‘magnetic sphere’ of the imperial civil servants. Almost the same pattern existed in Hungary, except that both the civil servants and the freelance professional supporters of the Centralists came from the nobility and not from the bourgeois circles of the Viennese court and the absolutist bureaucracy. In Hungary, several prominent representatives of centralist liberalism—for example, Eötvös and Kemény— were of aristocratic origin. In this respect, this trend can also be considered as part of the liberalism of the nobility. In a way, the Centralists’ views were similar to those of the Széchenyiled aristocratic liberals. Both groups occupied an intermediate position between the Viennese court and the landed gentry. Both groups regarded the feudal origin of the landed gentry as a hindrance to bourgeois development, noting, even during the Metternich era, some progressive elements in the policy of Vienna, which they thought the court had preserved from the enlightened absolutistic period of Joseph II and Maria Theresa. Neither the Centralists nor the aristocratic thinkers supported the idea of an independent nation-state. Both agreed that membership in the Habsburg Empire was Hungary’s best option if it wished to remain part of the civilized world. Both condemned Kossuth and his followers for wanting to establish a semi-modernized republic of ruling nobles. The aristocrats and the Centralists also agreed that a new parliamentary system, which the landed gentry intended to develop from the old, estate-based feudal system—the feudal Diet—was unlikely to be an important vehicle in guaranteeing a bourgeois transformation. There were several crucial points, of course, on which the views of the Centralists and the aristocratic liberals diverged. They did not share the aristocrats’ opinion concerning the role of private enterprise in establishing a bourgeois transformation. They believed the answer was to build up a modern bourgeois administration in place of the old county system. Continental liberalism, which grew out of the bureaucracy of absolutism, did not share the desire for minimizing the state of classical Anglo-Saxon liberalism. On the contrary, it considered the state an essential factor in bourgeois development. Continental liberalism believed in reform from above. In England and America highly developed, fullyfledged civil societies sought to restrict the power of the state. Continental liberalism, especially in the German states and France, was basically a trend of modernization. In these countries the main purpose was to boost the development of a weak, fragile, and barely existing bourgeois civil society. (In some countries—Hungary, for example—this civil soci-

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ety did not exist at all.) These liberals were convinced that the bourgeois state and a central government were most likely to modernize. In this respect they regarded the modern bourgeois state as the heir to the modernizing absolutist state, and indeed had no intention of restricting it, especially not by the maintenance of the municipal and administrative autonomy of the feudal counties. Although in the 1840s these three trends of liberalism were in sharp conflict, there was a kind of ‘agreement’ and a division of emphasis. They waged their wars on different fronts: the landed gentry fought the political fights, the aristocratic circle did a lot for the bourgeois transformation of the feudal landowners, and the Centralists contributed significantly to the development of political culture in Hungary.

IV. In 1848–49, the liberal nobility led a revolution and a war of independence in Hungary that initiated attempts to promote bourgeois development. The revolution laid the political foundation for the requisite social and economic developments, and the ‘April Laws,’ which actually formed a new constitution and created a long-term political platform for the forthcoming struggles. This was the legacy of 1848 that the nobility never gave up during the preliminary debates on the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867. If we examine the Compromise itself, we see that the liberal leaders of the nobility were quite successful in sticking to their principles. The international situation forced the neo-absolutist regime to yield. Western creditors wanted a guarantee that they would get their money back. They wanted to know that the loans which had to be paid back from the money of the citizens were not being forced from their pockets. They wanted to be sure that the tax-paying citizens had given their approval. In this way the Western creditors forced the absolutist system to give up its rigid mentality and move towards more liberal ideas. In 1867 the liberal nobility took power in Hungary and immediately set about realizing its comprehensive program of establishing a bourgeois society. The revolution had radically changed the balance of power within the liberal camp of the nobility and the characteristics of the individual trends themselves. The aristocratic circle lost Széchenyi, the only really prominent figure among them. After this it never regained its strength. Gentry liberalism, which was the dominant trend within the liberalism of the nobility even in the 1840s, and whose position became even stronger during the revolution of 1848, split into two factions during the debates on the Compromise of 1867. One of the factions, under the leadership of Deák, was ready to compromise with the court and live in peaceful co-existence with the Austrian provinces. The other camp, which listened to Kossuth and other revolutionaries in exile, wanted

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more. The Centralists, who belonged to the ‘peace party’ during the second year of the revolution, when the revolutionary government was seated in Debrecen in Eastern Hungary, used this political capital and favorable position at the court quite cleverly during the period just before the Compromise. Consequently, although they were not a strong, independent party—not even a characteristic separate group—they carved out an important role for themselves during the debates on the Compromise. It was between 1867 and 1875 that, as a result of a party fusion, a completely new political structure emerged, which proved to be relatively long-lasting. In 1875, the Deák party, which had concluded the Compromise, united with the most important opposition group, bringing into one camp the Liberal Party, the majority of the important landowners, and most of the leading industrial capitalists. For the next thirty years, the heterogeneous Liberal Party remained the ruling party. The year 1875, when Kálmán Tisza formed a new government, was the starting point of a new phase in the history of noble liberalism in Hungary. This was a crucial time—the ‘classical period’ of noble liberalism. As prime minister, Tisza had enough power to implement his program. During his years in government he endeavored to solve all the various problems of Hungarian bourgeois development, both in theory and in practice.

1. The liberals of the nobility always thought that Hungarians were Western and that Hungary had been a Western nation since Saint Stephen (István I) adopted Christianity in the year 1000, when he asked for and received a crown from Pope Sylvester II and thus became Hungary’s first Christian king. Even more importantly, he adopted the Western (Latin) version of Christianity, not the Eastern (Byzantine or Orthodox) one. Zsigmond Kemény, in an article published on 9 May 1847, went even further. He alleged that the so-called autochthonous Hungarian features were not the same as the ancient, original features of the Hungarians, but rather manifestations of backwardness and underdevelopment. These ancient features, he believed, were not part of the legacy of the Etelköz (the settlement of the Hungarian tribes before they conquered Hungary), they were simply archaic characteristics that the Hungarian ancestors took over from different Western societies a long time ago. The Hungarians’ ‘autochthonous’ features, that is, were just as much borrowed as those later condemned by conservatives as ‘alien’ features at odds with supposed original Hungarian characteristics. “When our wise philosophers talked about the national genius because they wanted to hamper progress and reject the demands of the day… I always tried to find the signs of this Hungarian genius in their works, but to no

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avail. As far as our laws are concerned, we were a borrowing nation [my italics] from the very beginning of our history. If we were to take a closer look at the innumerable laws of the constitution, allegedly original and reflecting this national genius, we would realize that these laws, which are actually a heavy burden on our current activity and constrain our movement in an extreme way, are all remnants of ancient laws we borrowed from abroad. They only seem to be original because European bourgeois development rejected them as ancient and outdated and forgot about them a long time ago” (Kemény, 1847). The supposition that the Hungarian nation is embedded in Western culture expressed the view that the Hungarian nation was an historical nation. The famous typology of Otto Bauer considered nations as historical only insofar as they had established a permanent state during the Middle Ages. It was not an indispensable criterion that the state always had to be independent, but even during the times of dependency, the state had to have a degree of autonomy. In his articles published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848, Marx referred to these same nations as the revolutionary nations of the Slavic region. Another definition of ‘historical nation’ was given by István Bibó. He felt that the most important criterion of an historical nation was that it had had its own national aristocracy throughout the Middle Ages. The people of these historical nations, the Hungarians, the Poles, and the Czechs, fell into this category, basing their national identity on the continuity of their Christian past. These nations could consider themselves an inherent part of Christian Western Europe. Those nations that did not have an independent state during the Middle Ages and did not belong to Western European culture needed some other means to assert their national identity. They conjured up ancient myths of origin and recreated them in a romantic form. The Slovaks evoked the empire of Svatopluk; the Bulgarians the time of Tsar Simeon; the Serbs cherished the memory of the empire of Tsar Dusan from the early Middle Ages, which was finally destroyed by the Turks. The Romanians revived the historical myth of the Daco-Romans, claiming that the empire of King Decebal survived the fall of the Dacians in a Latinized form. The desire to maintain the continuity of national history was intermingled with the consciousness and purpose of bourgeois development. The continuous history of the historical nation-state was juxtaposed with the bourgeois nation-state as its immediate precondition and a kind of pre-history of the modern bourgeois world, although this was a rude manipulation of the real continuity of history. The creation and making of constitutional history is not the same as the real historical continuity of the constitution; it is not the acceptance of the fact that every historical period has its own self-contained development with its own unique laws. Rather it is understanding an histori-

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cal system of myths in such as way as to support the ideology of the liberalism of the nobility. Its function was to prove that in the Middle Ages the Hungarian nation, which acquired its national identity through the liberal ideology of the nobility, was one of the nations that laid the foundations of modern European institutions. What is more, at that time, asserted the followers of this trend, the Hungarians were in many respects more advanced than most of what were later to become more developed Western societies. Historicism is an inherent element of this way of thinking. In the history of a historical nation there is no real development. In historical analogies and parables, the events that befall an historical nation in different periods can always be substituted for one another. Its institutions, irrespective of the time of their birth, are always similar. Its historical laws are perennial. The supposition that Hungarian feudalism—which was based on the principle of avicitas (entailment)—was not a system of vassalage was an important element in the political thinking of the noble liberals. The idea originated from Imre Hajnik, who claimed that during the early stage of feudalism, before the emergence of the nobility as an estate, there was no vassalage hierarchy in the organization of the Hungarian nobility. For this reason, argued Hajnik, the state system of the medieval Hungarian nation was more developed and more similar to a modern state than were the Western European systems. In contrast to the vassalage system of the West, which resulted in a highly divided state system and which was principally based on private law, the Hungarian state system was more integrated, and consequently represented a higher stage of development. By this clever twist, the early feudal Hungarian state system, which was in many respects primitive and archaic, and which preserved many characteristics from nomadic times, was interpreted as superior to the vassalage system. This idea was a very important element of Hungarian political culture, especially as far as nationalistic sentiments were concerned. The Hungarian nation, especially because of its medieval past, was considered to be more constitutional and more community-oriented than the Western nations, who put private interests before the interests of the community. As a result, they said, the Hungarians were more patriotic and Hungarian nationalism stronger and more intense than that of other peoples. Consequently, it had to be more cherished. The most important myth of Hungarian constitutional history-making was the myth of the Golden Bull, which was used to support the supposition that the Hungarian feudal constitution possessed essentially the same features as the later bourgeois ones. The Golden Bull—which was issued in 1222—was taken as evidence that the Hungarian nation belonged in the vanguard of bourgeois development: after Magna Carta, the Hungarian Golden Bull was the earliest constitution in Europe. There

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was a clause in the constitution which made it particularly important for the noble liberals: the concluding paragraph gave the bishops and magnates the right to resist should the king fail to keep his promises. This was interpreted as the earliest equivalent of the liberals’ efforts to minimize the role of the state. Another important element of this history-making ideology was the supposition that Hungarian feudalism had ‘invented’ the social contract theory much earlier than Rousseau or even Bodin. One of the most important sources that supported this theory was the introduction of Simon Kézai’s widely known thirteenth-century chronicle, in which he described the alliance of the seven Hungarian tribes which was sealed with blood. As far as the Holy Crown doctrine of István Werböczy’s Tripartitum was concerned, the theorists went even further, considering this document of 1514 as one of the first genuine social contract theories. The nation, on this interpretation, was a political body which existed in the unity of the una eademque nobilitas and the king. If we translate this idea into the language of the social contract theory, we get a popular notion of gentry liberalism according to which the elected king of Hungary obtained his authority from the nobility. This implied that the king could not claim the crown by right of succession, but on the basis of a contract. Similarly, the basic relationships within the noble estates and the relationship between nobility and ruler were also regulated by (legal) contracts. The idea of a republic of nobles, the first seeds of which appeared in the Principality of Transylvania, was also interpreted as the direct ancestor of modern parliamentarism. The liberal nobility’s history-making determined how they viewed Hungary’s place in the world. In their view, Hungary qualified as a modern nation. This was not only characteristic of cheap journalism: Zsigmond Kemény, for example—who can by no means be accused of naive romanticism and who was a prominent thinker of European standing— also fell under the influence of this attitude and the subliminal force of history-making. The ideology of the Tripartitum was not part of the political culture in which he was educated. Still, in 1846 he wrote a series of articles in the Pesti Hírlap under the title Montesquieu and King Béla I, which compared people of totally different eras. As strange and unhistorical as the idea may sound today (Béla I was king of Hungary in the middle of the eleventh century), at the time he did not consider the comparison absurd at all. In other cases he went even further and used the arguments of this mythical approach as a political instrument. Kemény—who as a centralist argued against the county system—gave recognition and credit to the counties in his book After the Revolution. He claimed that the political life of the counties had developed a modern political culture within the nobility and had implanted the ability to discuss politics in the body public, the most important element of mod-

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ern constitutional democracy. The aura of these county meetings was very different from the Southern European political meetings, which usually ended in a plot. The political meetings of the Hungarian nobility served as an excellent means to educate the nobility and to discuss political questions in public. These county assemblies had lengthy and detailed discussions on every important political issue in the country. This well-balanced, rational political method was close to the way liberal parliaments discussed political issues, and was completely unsuitable as a forum in which to organize revolutions or political assassinations. Kemény argued that the nobles, who had become accustomed to the free atmosphere of these meetings, would never resort to revolutionary methods, not even under oppressive political regimes. These nobles would never give up the independence and personal autonomy they enjoyed in the county assemblies. They would never submit themselves to the dictates of the secret political staff of a Carbonari commandante. This reasoning served as a means of pacifying the neo-absolutists, and assured them that the re-establishment of the autonomy of the counties in its 1847 form would not amount to any political danger for the central authorities. The implicit message was just the opposite, however: if the court procrastinated in taking this step the Hungarian nobility might also adopt the Carbonari attitude, causing real problems for Vienna. All these thoughts were blended into an ideological mixture of modern liberalism. The Hungarian county represented a political structure that could serve as a model of a liberal political community, a civil society that was apt to discuss and make politics. If we use the other end of the same logical chain as a starting point, we get the same result: in contrast to French and Italian political life, which fluttered about between the extremes of democracy and Bonapartist despotism, the Hungarian county could produce a political life which was deeply rooted in financial independence and had a strong civil society. It created a local autonomy which could successfully restrict the power of the center and minimize the role of the state. For the noble liberals, who gained political power after the Compromise of 1867, modern Hungary was more than the realization of an historical illusion, a dream which sought justification in the historical past: it was a program of modernization. Gusztáv Beksics, in his book A Szabadelvû Párt története (History of the Liberal Party), which was published posthumously in 1907, described the policy of the political regime during the second half of the nineteenth century in Hungary in the following way: “The Deák party aimed to create a modern, European Hungary, but at the same time they completely ignored the purpose of creating a national Hungary” (Beksics, 1907, p. 43). (In this context, a ‘national Hungary’ meant one which has not assimilated the national minorities.) This is a serious criticism of liberalism.

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Aurél Kecskeméthy (pen-name Aranyos Kákay), who always retained something of his past as a ‘Bach Hussar’ (a contemptuous term for a Hungarian civil servant on the Austrian payroll during the Bach era in the 1850s) and who never really stepped out of the ideological circle of neo-absolutism, had a different opinion. He thought that “Hungary, with its present chaotic administration, represents a transformation from European civilization towards a Moldavian–Wallachian type of country” (Kákay, p. 37).

2. Capitalist development met with philosophical opposition from the very beginning. A romantic anti-capitalism opposed the object of its hatred— which these romantic thinkers blamed for the destruction of important traditions—in terms of an idealized past. One can even stumble upon elements of this attitude in such famous works as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which Marx gives a brilliant description of how capitalism destroyed traditional communities and bonds. Although his comprehensive analysis is basically an assertion of the modernization process, his work is full of romantic anti-capitalist details. As far as the liberalism of the Hungarian nobility was concerned, their attitude towards capitalism was more positive, if more romantic. Mór Jókai, a famous nineteenth-century Hungarian writer, gave a typical description of a romantic capitalist hero in his classic novel The Golden Man. Mihály Tímár, the noble hero of the book, is an idealized Hungarian entrepreneur. Tímár is a real romantic hero, noble-minded, selfsacrificing, and moral—in fact, the very opposite of a capitalist ‘shark.’ ‘Despite’ these noble characteristics, Tímár is a successful businessman. For the romantic pro-capitalist writers, the entrepreneur was just as much a heroic figure as a cavalier or a knight, an explorer who discovers distant and unknown places, or an artist. The characteristics of an entrepreneur are shaped according to the same aesthetic values as any other poetic hero. He is the ‘hero of the age,’ a title which did not, as yet, imply any irony. There was still some time to go before the tide of sentiment changed. By 1901, a gutter-press magazine published an antiSemitic poem about a robber knight and a Jew, who built a factory in the valley on the ruins of the robber knight’s castle. The poem compares the traditional landowner and the Jewish factory owner and the refrain concludes that “the Jew is also a robber, but unfortunately he is not a knight.” The ravaging, looting landowner is celebrated and enjoys all the advantages of an aesthetic transformation in the literature of romantic anti-capitalism. The capitalist, on the other hand, is not only immoral (in reality the robber knight was just as immoral), but he has another

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feature that is even more unpardonable according to the aesthetic values of romanticism: he is ugly. Romanticism was not alien to the supporters of capitalist development. A good example of the romantic view of capitalist production and of what the romantic liberals thought about the relationship between the of aesthetic and utilitarian values of capitalism is expressed in the notes that Aurél Kecskeméthy made in his diary on 21 June 1870: “The beauty of Pest cannot be a consideration. The only purpose we have to have in mind is the urgent development of its commerce: docks, entrepots, connecting railway lines, custom houses, navigation and shipping, are what we need now. Pest is beautiful to the eye, but it will never be as cozy and charming as Vienna or Paris. First of all, its location is not as nice as theirs; it lies on the border of sandy lowlands, on the edge of the ‘puszta.’ Secondly, the sources of its vigor and vitality, the goods it trades in, are nastier: wool, fat, leather, suet, hemp, and so on, all involve amply filthy refuse and a penetrating stink” (Kecskeméthy, p. 264). The noble liberals were so keen on the modernization and capitalist development of Hungary that, although their romantic attitude always preferred aesthetic values above all, for the sake of progress and the development of commerce, they were ready to spoil the capital. At the same time, the description of this hideousness and foulness is so picturesque and passionate that it almost becomes poetic, forging a new aesthetic value. The fact that all this putrefaction was important for the nation gave a new, heroic aspect to the issue, and neutralized the vulgarity of reality. According to the program of the noble liberals the bourgeoisie was to emerge from the noble landowning classes. This was not only the expectation of the Hungarian liberals. The protagonist of Wajda’s famous film The Promised Land, adapted from a nineteenth-century novel, is a former gentry Polish bourgeois who is just as cruel and immoral in his capitalist ambitions as his rivals, the German and Jewish capitalists. Although his fall is inevitable because of his immoral character, both the book and the film undoubtedly convey the message that he is a tragic national hero.

3. At the end of the day, as we know, the expectations of the Hungarian noble liberals’ romantic pro-capitalism were not fulfilled. The core of the Hungarian bourgeoisie could not be recruited from the landowning nobility, despite the fact that most of them cultivated their estates in a new, more or less capitalist way. Finally, the traditional noblemen were not able to transform themselves into modern merchants, bankers, and factory owners. After long and strenuous struggles, it was the Jewish merchants who bought up the corn of the large estates and emerged

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victorious. On the one hand, they had to contend with the Serb merchants, who carried the corn and other grain crops of the estates to the cities (before they were soon superseded by the steamships and the railways), and with the Greek merchants, who also had an important role in the cork trade on the Danube. (Most of the Greeks went home after Greece was liberated from the Turks in 1821.) They also had to defeat the Armenian merchants, who tended to monopolize local trade in particular areas. This challenge struck one section of the landowning nobility—those who professed liberal ideas—hard. The landed nobility hit back at the beginning of the 1880s. This was the time when the descendants of the middle-ranking landowners became ‘gentry’, re-discovering and re-emphasizing their noble origin in response to the victory of the new bourgeoisie. The aversion to the new Jewish bourgeoisie also manifested itself in a political form. The anti-Semitic party of Istóczy very effectively expressed the intense political emotions of the gentry. Dezsô Margittay, a landowning representative of the party, wrote a political pamphlet entitled The Gentry Remains!, in which he clearly aired the views of the gentry in their new situation. Although they failed to become bourgeois, they would nevertheless not fade away. The gentry remained, he wrote, as a ruling class in its old social position and would never give up. The new class—the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie—would never take the gentry’s position, he promised. The argument on the basis of which the gentry could claim this ruling position was, of course, national: the landed gentry was the ultimate embodiment of the idiosyncratic national characteristics. The new, foreign ruling class would kill the true Hungarian identity. The gentry intended to realize this new program with a number of ‘re-feudalizing’ actions: they started to use their fringia, coats-of-arms and titles of nobility, again, together with all the relics of the old feudal life they had previously put away in the hope of bourgeois development. Although the aristocracy, the other supporter of noble liberalism, did not behave demonstratively, it was present in the background as a stabilizing social force. Although the ideological monopoly that the liberalism of the nobility had enjoyed since 1867 was broken by the appearance and temporary party organization of the anti-Semitic forces, the liberal circle did not yield, fighting back under the leadership of the Tisza government. Having been forced to defend themselves against their opponents, they had to organize their political platform and think over their program. This was the primary message of Gusztáv Beksics’s political pamphlet Társadalmunk és nemzeti hivatásunk (Our Society and National Mission), published in 1884. (Margittay’s political brochure was actually a response to this pamphlet.) The author was quite explicit about the requirement that the whole middle stratum in society must be combined to form a united Hungarian capitalist bourgeois class. He insisted that this “Hun-

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garian democracy” must also include Jewish citizens, whom he considered an inherent part of the Hungarian national bourgeoisie. In 1883, when the Istóczy party organized several political riots, Kálmán Tisza first formulated an argument which he repeated many times thereafter: what starts as confiscation of the fortunes of the Jews would end in a communist confiscation of the fortunes of all. The Tisza government succeeded in excluding the anti-Semite party from the political arena quite quickly, and by the middle of the 1880s the latter had completely disappeared. The liberalism of the nobility had gained a glorious victory, but it was never to regain its ideological monopoly: the shadow of a new, more combatant conservatism was hanging over the country. What is more, before this conservatism fully developed, a degenerate, extreme right-wing form of it suddenly emerged. At the same time, working class movements started to appear at the other extreme of the political spectrum. At the end of the 1880s, the liberalism of the nobility was still in a dominant position, but it had no future.

4. The liberalism of the Hungarian nobility started to assert itself in the form of a political party only a decade before the revolution and war of independence of 1848–49. The political camp led by Kossuth organized itself into a party during the parliamentary debates. Their conservative opponents organized themselves in the same way. Beksics used Zsigmond Kemény to express the party’s standpoint: “He was convinced that success could be achieved only by parties, not by individuals. That is why he always remained honest and committed to his party… He comforted himself with the truth formulated by Burke, that politics is not a science of absolute truth. If it were so, political parties or parliamentarism would be out of the question.” As we have seen, the liberalism of the nobility, like the liberal philosophy in general, professed a kind of ideological relativism. This was actually the political manifestation of tolerance, the acceptance of the supposition that, in theory at least, other opinions might also be valid. The existence of the political party as an institution is based on the acceptance of this theory. If there is only one recognizable and justifiable truth in politics, political will is bound to pursue and enforce that single truth. But if unquestionable truth cannot be discerned in political life, political will can only express opinions; it is for this reason that political parties are organized and the institution of parliament established. Dictatorships, on the contrary, force society to endure the fact that the political will declares a single opinion to be the absolute truth. The institution of the political party developed further during the war of independence. At this time, the liberal reform opposition of the

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1820s became even more differentiated. Zsigmond Kemény, in a later analysis in which he tried to justify his position during the revolution and the war of independence, explained this differentiation in the following way: he and the peace party were the equivalent of the Girondins of the French Revolution, while the supporters of the Kossuth–Madarász line— which, although actually two different lines, was treated by Kemény as if they were one—were the equivalent of the Jacobins (Beksics, 1883, p. 54). After 1867, the political parties became the most important forums of political life in Hungary. The ruling liberal party of the nobility also accepted the political party as an institution. In the 1870s, Aurél Kecskeméthy aired the opinion of the Hungarian noble liberals about parties in general when he wrote a highly critical article on the American party system: he described the professional party functionary of the democratic parties (and any other party that went beyond liberalism) in the following way: “What are these politicians? The answer: All kinds of people: lawyers, doctors, journalists, who cannot make a career in their original profession. Merchants, bar-keepers, tailors, woodcutters, bullfighters, dogcatchers, gamblers, swindlers, sidewalkers, idlers, people who failed in their businesses or simply got bored. They usually start their political career as a canvasser in the service of a political party” (Kecskeméthy, 1877, p. 318). The basis of this sharp, almost repugnant criticism was the noble liberals’ view that the leadership and organization of a political party must be in the hands of financially independent persons (materially independent landowners, if possible). Otherwise (as in the case of the democratic parties) the political party fails to work and becomes a mere tool in the hands of dishonest adventurers. The new political situation in 1867 produced several new political parties, but they all professed basically the same ideas. “There was no fierce or systematic fight between the political parties as far as the major issue, the establishment of a modern and national Hungary, was concerned” (Beksics, 1907, p. 43). The parties argued over the character of the relationship between Budapest and Vienna and evaluated the importance of the Compromise in different ways, but their ideological background was similar. The Deák party, which concluded the Compromise of 1867 and supported it unanimously, stood on the platform of noble liberalism just as much as the Kossuth party. The Kossuth party was forced to emigrate in 1849 and was strenuously opposed to the Compromise. The ‘center-left’, under Tisza’s leadership, first shared the opinion of the Kossuth emigration, but later accepted the Ausgleich and united with the Deák party. At the same time, Tisza’s party was just as liberal as the Independence Party, which never gave up the principles of 1848 and rejected the Compromise. Between 1848 and 1867 political life in Hungary became more polarized, but the underlying ideas remained the same.

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5. The liberalism of the nobility was an ideology shared by two different social strata, the aristocracy and the non-magnate landowners, although both were of noble origin. During the Reform Age of the 1820s and 1830s, Széchenyi and the Wesselényi–Deák–Kossuth line represented their interests separately, but still within a common liberal framework. After 1867 the interests of the aristocracy completely divorced themselves from those of the non-magnate nobility, and Pál Sennyey established an independent, conservative aristocratic party. From this time on, the aristocratic party had a conservative identity and took part in political life as a Hungarian Tory party. The landowning middle nobility kept its liberal identity and called itself szabadelvû (‘liberal’ or ‘freethinking’). But names are misleading. In reality, it is very difficult to tell where the border lay between the conservative aristocratic party and the Centralists, who represented the bourgeois (continental) version of liberalism in Hungary. There were three lines within the liberalism of the nobility: the Centralists stood at one extreme; at the other extreme was the liberalism of the non-magnate nobility. When the Sennyey party demanded the liquidation of the county municipalities and the establishment of a strong central administration, its main purpose was to weaken the political position of the non-magnate nobility. But the central administration they wanted to establish was more of a bourgeois, French-type affair than one would expect from liberal noblemen. “Senney and his followers were radical centralists, and Tisza and the ‘center-left’ were conservative municipalists” (Beksics, 1907, p. 20). The effort to establish an independent aristocratic party was aborted. The party attracted only a very small circle and remained on the periphery. Most aristocrats joined the Deák party and united with a significant number of ‘minority’ non-magnate landowners, forming a separate ‘party’ within this framework. The majority of the non-magnate nobility belonged to Tisza’s party. The main social force behind the Deák party was the aristocracy. They never took a leading position, in the belief that their interests would be best represented if they remained disguised as a party of the gentry. This was the first significant distortion of the political culture as presented by the liberal nobility in Hungary. This must have been why Deák refused to form a government after the conclusion of the Compromise. He found a number of other excuses, of course—for example, minor corruption scandals—but after struggling for the Compromise, the last thing he wanted to do was “to paint the signboard of the gentry on the front of an aristocratic shop.” He forced reality to reveal itself by choosing an aristocrat, Gyula Andrássy, to establish the first government (after the Compromise). But this did not

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last long. In 1875 the center-left united with the Deák party. With this fusion almost the whole of the landed gentry (the independence fraction was not included) was ‘forced’ into the same situation as the middle nobility of the Deák party. Kálmán Tisza was ready to do the aristocracy the favors Deák had earlier refused them. During his fifteen years as Prime Minister and head of the government, Tisza laid the foundations of bourgeois development in Hungary. His government fostered the illusion that the gentry was the ruling political power. From 1875 a new method of policy-making became dominant in Hungary: party fusion. “This has become the dominant form of policymaking in the Hungarian parliament, not the rotation of the parties in power… Party fusion and joining or leaving the party, these were the only movements in the Hungarian Parliament” (Beksics, 1907, p. 21). Unlike in Britain and the United States, for example, the two landowning ruling classes in Hungary did not establish separate parties and did not operate within the framework of a two-party system, rotating power. In 1848 and 1867 this possibility was not completely absurd; in both cases there was a kind of duality in the field of ideology and the rotation of the Liberal and the Independence Parties could have become a political reality. What put a stop to this was the existence of the Habsburg Monarchy, which would never have consented to the rule of the Independence Party in Hungary. The aristocratic circle’s effort to disguise its power and political hegemony, together with the marginality of the Independence Party, created a strange and unique situation in Hungary. Since there was a party ‘concealed’ within the ruling (aristocratic) party, and there was another party (the Independence Party) on the periphery of political life, the one-party system was more of a ‘three-quarters of a one-party’ system. The ruling party did not have an opposition—there were no other parties that would have been able to assume power. On the other hand, the ruling party could not imagine itself in opposition. When the government collapsed during the 1905–1906 crisis, the Liberal party dissolved, re-organizing (under another name) only in 1910, when they could be sure of victory again. Their expectations were fulfilled: in the June elections, the National Labor Party, the new Liberal party, gained an absolute majority. Despite the fact that in some respects the conditions were favorable after 1867, the liberalism of the nobility was not able to establish a twoparty system in Hungary. In fact, it was a long time before this ideal form of parliamentary government finally appeared. The one-party system was not introduced into Hungary until 1948, and it can be said that such a system ruled Hungary between 1867 and 1945. As a consequence of this, the political party as an institution had very little prestige in Hungarian political culture. Hungarian political thinking was always suspi-

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cious of this organization of democratic public life and had enormous reservations about it. The vague attempt between 1945 and 1948 to establish a multi-party system did not change much in this respect. It was only in 1956 that the demand for a multi-party system first manifested itself with overwhelming force. The ruling Liberal Party supported the Compromise of 1867. The Independence Party, which was opposed to the Compromise and tried to stick to the principles of 1848, did very badly in the elections. Until the middle or even the end of the 1880s, however, election results reflected the opinions of a very restricted stratum, the landowning nobility. It is very difficult to guess how many votes the Independence Party could have gained at the elections, but there are indirect sources that allow us to suppose quite accurately that the ‘public’, i. e. those who lived below and beyond official political life, especially the peasantry, had strong feelings for the revolution of 1848. The official policy was based on the acceptance of the Compromise, but under the surface the majority were probably against it for more than two decades. Between the two world wars, many authors who had vivid and accurate memories from the period before the First World War unanimously claimed that the István Tisza government refused to give the franchise to a wider public because it wanted to exclude the peasantry who clearly supported 1848. This included even those authors who had pro-1867 sentiments. It was not the national minorities or the social democrat workers that threatened the stability of the political regime but the potential collapse of the Compromise. The possibility that the unanimous acceptance of the Compromise could not be justified. The political culture of the liberal nobility was permeated by an intense animosity towards 1848 and especially its leader, Kossuth. At the same time, the cult of Széchenyi was getting stronger. The liberal nobility decided to pursue Széchenyi’s consciously apolitical course. The liberal nobility endeavored to find non-political, economic, social, and cultural answers to political questions. Moderation and caution had become the main political values. Everything was interpreted in terms of danger rather than possibilities. Every political step was determined by the supposition that everything achieved so far was in perpetual danger and the country had no prospects at all. The revolutionary feelings of ordinary people were suppressed. Nevertheless, there are numerous ethnographic artifacts that clearly prove that these pro-1848 sentiments were still alive: village houses, for example, were wallpapered with oleographs of patriotic paintings of the 1848 revolution. By the end of the century, however, even this type of patriotism had disappeared or become completely empty.

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6. The liberal regime of the Hungarian nobility wavered between centralization and autonomy from the moment it took power in 1867. On the one hand, there existed the demand to retain the autonomy of the counties, to establish a strong municipal system which would be able to realize the minimization of the state, the main purpose of the landowners. On the other hand, there was the possibility of establishing a highly centralized administration which would be able to modernize the system. Beksics described the theoretical relationship between the two trends in the following way: “In the case of exaggerated centralization the people are on a war footing, while in the case of decentralization, they can relax and gather their strength” (Beksics, 1907, p. 50). In other words, where the administration has to serve the transformation of a given situation, centralization is the proper method, and where it has to govern under more stable social conditions, decentralization and administrative autonomy become more appropriate. He goes on to examine the advantages and disadvantages of centralization: “Centralization is a proper and acceptable means for the state to assert its will. It is a good and quick way of administration, although in most cases it is very expensive” (Beksics, 1907, p. 50). Aurél Kecskeméthy, who could never rid himself of his neo-absolutist attitude, found centralization the only correct way of administering a modern country. “We need a strong, unified and modern state administration or else we will create a caricature of the pre1847 situation” (Kecskeméthy, 1909, p. 264), he wrote in his diary on 24 February 1867. On the other hand, in After the Revolution, Zsigmond Kemény, who represented the centralist line of liberalism, claimed that the county was an exceptionally good and well-developed vehicle with which to realize the classical liberal goal of minimizing the power of the state: “The political spirit of the county taught the people to live without central administration to such a degree that to have expected it in any other country would have been totally inconceivable. The judges of the County Courts (táblabíró) were left to their own resources” (Kemény, 1908, p. 22).

7. After the Compromise of 1867 the liberal regime of the Hungarian nobility introduced several measures concerning the autonomy of the national minorities—and the nationality issue generally—that far exceeded the general European standards of the time. The Deák party outlined a comprehensive program guaranteeing extensive rights to the national minorities in Hungary. Although most of these laws were never accepted, Hungary was, at least at the time, the only country besides Switzerland to

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try to solve the nationality problem by legislation. Beksics described this program in the following way: “Who can be so ignorant as not to recognize the signs foreshadowing the collapse of the historical Hungary and the birth of a federal state of different nationalities with new nationality laws and the establishment of two Eastern religions? Who could be so ignorant as not to see that, during the period when the Deák party was in power, the nationality debates in the Palace of Sándor Street were paving the way for a parliament of various nationalities?” (Beksics, 1907, p. 44) This interpretation of events is not surprising, since Beksics’s book was published in 1907 and written under the influence of the reviving nationality movements and the Memorandum trial of the 1890s. We might suppose that contemporary responses were different, but they were not. Quite the opposite. Kecskeméthy went even further when on 21 June 1870 he made the following entry in his diary: “In Hungary there are two reasonable choices: one of them is that we try to keep and assert the historical supremacy of the Hungarian nation, in which case we have to give up all the nice slogans and flowers of rhetoric about free institutions, autonomy, liberalism, and democracy. Even the Hungarian nation will have to sacrifice certain rights that could be used against it by the nationalities. This choice means strict dictatorship, strong centralization, and the supremacy of the Hungarian language. If we choose the other possibility, our starting point has to be just the opposite. We have to accept the fact that the linguistic supremacy of the Hungarian nation is no longer a relevant purpose and that the nationalities cannot be bridled merely by institutional means. In this case we have to support the idea of a polyglot state with its free institutions and all the other consequences, including the most extreme ones. The Deák party is in a total ideological confusion and is swaying between these two choices, on the Right and Left.” (Kecskeméthy, 1909, p. 183) As we can see, Kecskeméthy went along the road in theory and drew the final conclusion: if Magyarization is the chosen program, the state has to introduce dictatorship. The assimilation of the nationalities cannot be realized without a comprehensive suppression, which would obviously not leave the Hungarian nation and society untouched either. Any liberal institution is completely incompatible with this program, because the nationalities might be able to use it for their own purposes. At the turn of the century, this idea was developed by Mihály Réz, a Hungarian political scientist. Réz, who had a thorough knowledge of Marx, added the theory of the proletarian dictatorship to Kecskeméthy’s concept. He spoke of a provisional dictatorship, claiming that a bourgeois society could be established only within the framework of an ethnically and linguistically homogeneous nation-state. He was convinced that, after the introduction of a bourgeois system, Hungary must go through a temporary phase of assimilative dictatorship. The dictatorship he

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advocated was similar to the comprehensive oppression that Kecskeméthy had in mind in his post-neoabsolutist theory. As soon as the assimilation process had been completed, said Réz, democracy could be introduced again. After the conclusion of the Compromise in 1867, however, political thinking started to develop in the other direction. As far as the autonomy of the nationalities was concerned, some authors went even further than the 1868 nationality law, which was basically formulated by Deák. According to István Toldy, who aired his views on the nationality issue in a political pamphlet entitled Pártjaink feladata a választások után (The Tasks of our Parties after the Elections), Hungary should be a “federation of nations.” Kecskeméthy’s comment on this suggestion was the following: “Switzerland or America … would transform this polyglot Hungary into a Hungarian–German–Slovak–Serb–Romanian federation” (Kecskeméthy, 1869, p. 83). The recently mooted idea of an East European Switzerland turns out to have emerged right after the Compromise of 1867. All the plans mentioned above remained on paper. Under Kálmán Tisza the Magyarization tendency was not very strong, but generous concessions providing comprehensive rights to the nationalities were also lacking. Intensive assimilation tendencies appeared only after the turn of the century and were clear signs of the onset of a new era which brought the crisis of Hungarian noble liberalism to the surface.

V. Until the turn of the century the liberalism of the Hungarian nobility was able to maintain its position. Some of its theories—for example, ‘national democracy’—became very popular and were widely used in independent essay writing. According to this historicist view, noble behavior had become the most typical characteristic of Hungarian society, the majority of whose members had their origin in the lesser nobility. This feature made Hungarian society democratic to an extremely high degree. This was a real democracy, claimed Hungarian liberal politicians, in which everybody, without exception and to an equal degree, is noble (una eademque nobilitas). Although the liberal nobility’s theory of ‘national democracy’ sounds anachronistic today, the idea took on a new life between the two world wars, when the anti-Nazi politician Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky revived it. A radically new situation developed in Hungary in the 1890s, when, after rapid industrial development, it became clear that the Hungarian financial, manufacturing, and trading bourgeoisie was mostly of Jewish origin and that this new social class was strong enough to become the ruling class in an economic sense. In the 1890s Sándor Wekerle’s gov-

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ernment drew up a comprehensive plan to lay the economic and institutional foundations of capitalist development and of the transformation of Hungary into a bourgeois society. It was under Wekerle that Parliament voted in 1894–95 for obligatory civil marriages, and adopted numerous canon laws. One of the most important was the one that made Judaism an accepted religion. This measure was the last step in the process of emancipating the Jews. Although their legal emancipation took place at the beginning of the reform changes, in 1868, they had to wait almost thirty years for their social emancipation. The law of 1894–95 took away the obstacle preventing mixed marriages. (Even after 1868 the Church forbade marriages between Jews and Christians.) This measure opened up the possibility for the Jewish bourgeoisie to marry Christians who belonged to the same social class and had the same financial background. The sharp political reaction against civil marriages seemed to be a religious issue, but it was, in effect, a counteraction and protest against the integration of the Jews into ‘Catholic society.’ This anti-Semitic tendency made political Catholicism increasingly strong in Hungary. The Catholic People’s Party, a new ‘revisionist’ party, demanded the amendment of the new canon laws. (Istóczy’s conservative party had also been a revisionist party, demanding the revision of the law providing legal emancipation for the Jews.) This new Catholic party performed its anti-Semitic role so perfectly that its existence made the revival of the Istóczy party unnecessary. (Istóczy, who was still active at this time, did make an attempt to re-establish his anti-Semitic party, however.) There was another strong, relatively extreme, and theoretically conservative trend that took up the fight against the new bourgeois ruling class, which, after gaining ground in economic life and achieving legal and social emancipation, was now endeavoring to obtain equivalent positions in political life as well—considering their wealth and economic power, this equivalent position could not be anything less than a share of government. Besides political Catholicism, there were the National Party, led by Count Albert Apponyi, and the Hungarian Landowners’ Association, whose leader was Sándor Károlyi. The latter disguised its conservative character and hid behind a large landowners’ organization, because political life in Hungary was divided between 1848 and 1867. The bipolarity of 1848 and 1867 was much more dominant in political life than that of liberalism and conservatism. The Hungarian Landowners’ Association, which was in fact a conservative party, did not believe it was strong enough to change this rigid political structure in Hungary, as a consequence of which they decided to pursue their conservative aims in the form of a pressure group rather than a party. They tried to integrate their supporters into every political organization except the bourgeois liberal and social democratic parties. By using paternalistic

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economic means against the new bourgeoisie, they tried to control their political ambitions so as to prevent them from gaining prominent and leading positions. They tried to restrict their income by using redistributive principles which could be justified only on political grounds. Their program, which was similar to that of the corporate state of a later period, preferred the principle of ‘reorganization of finances’ to that of profit. They advocated the principle of social protectionism above all, intending to use a special economic policy, providing particular tax, customs, and tariff privileges to some social groups, thus making it possible for them to obtain higher incomes than would have been possible in a free market. They wanted to support declining and collapsing branches of industry, which could not survive in a competitive market, at the expense of prosperous industries. At the turn of the century, the Hungarian Landowners’ Association thought of favoring the peasantry and noble owners of large estates (the gentry problem). In the first instance, in an attempt to justify their economic policy, they stressed social peace, saying that if the peasantry, the largest stratum of society, went bankrupt, social order could no longer be maintained. The other explanation they used to support their ideology appealed to alleged national interests. They claimed that if the given social strata, which embodied the true national characteristics, were to collapse financially, Hungarian national identity would be in danger and might disappear with them. The Conservative camp launched an immediate offensive as soon as the National Party dissolved itself in 1899 and its members joined the Liberal Party. Under the government of Kálmán Széll, who in many respects professed similar ideas to those of the conservatives, they gained much ground and their influence became strong. The first step in the paternalistic reform process was the usury law of 1902, which aimed— by political means and for political ends—to control and restrict the charging of interest. The new wealthy bourgeoisie had two possibilities open to it if it wished to take part in politics. One was to establish a new political party to represent its interests. This would have resulted in the development of a two-party system: in this case, the two political poles of society, the liberal party of the bourgeoisie and the conservative party of the landowning nobility would have rotated power. This would have meant the end of the liberalism of the nobility: since the new liberal party would have been bound to profess bourgeois liberal ideas and the landowning nobility would have relied on the revived conservatism, the noble liberals would have lost their footing. There was another way of re-arranging the political scene, in accordance with which the political structure of 1875 would have to be restored: there would be a single ruling party

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which the new upper bourgeoisie could join. This solution would also have changed the ideological profile of the ruling party. As a response to the strengthening attacks of the conservatives, the bourgeoisie made an attempt to form their own liberal party in the 1890s. However, the new party, led by Vilmos Vázsonyi, was not strong enough to develop itself into a powerful bourgeois party able to form a government. The only political force that would have been suitable for this task was the bourgeois wing of the Liberal Party, under the leadership of István Tisza and Dezsô Bánffy. This political wing was ready to take the interests of the new bourgeoisie into consideration and accept their representatives within its ranks, and aimed to restrict the influence of the old landowning nobility. The administration of the Széll government, which came under the sway of the conservatives, proved to be shortlived. The bourgeois wing of the Liberal Party took control again and formed a government under the leadership of István Tisza. This political success gave way to a theoretical elaboration of bourgeois liberalism itself. The pioneers who first tackled this problem, Ágost Pulszky and Gyula Pikler, came from the field of jurisprudence. The Hungarian Freemasons’ Lodge also became involved, and in 1900, when the founders of the Social Science Association established their circle, they too had this purpose in mind. The conservative camp was forced onto the defensive and had to change its strategy. After realizing that conservative rhetoric had not worked, they tried to garner support under the banner of independence, taking advantage of the Monarchy’s demand that Hungary raise the yearly recruitment quota. Such military preparations would have induced strong pacifist reactions everywhere else in Europe, but Hungary was the exception. In Hungary the opposition—mainly the Independence Party—used this as a good opportunity to give voice to their national aims. They demanded that, in return for acceptance of the recruitment bill, Vienna introduce Hungarian as the service and command language for units recruited in Hungary. In the midst of preparations for war, Vienna was reluctant to disrupt the unity of the armed forces and was opposed to changing the conditions of the Compromise of 1867, which would have had a knock-on effect to the army. Behind the Independence Party, which had become permeated by the new form of conservatism, conservative forces were preparing an offensive on the pretext of fighting for this symbol of independence. Their real purpose was to defeat the orthodox liberal supporters of 1867, who were ready to accept Vienna’s demands and form a new Széll government, hoping to regain their strength and influence. The long struggle for power under the non-parliamentary ‘caretaker’ government seemingly ended with the victory of the conservative forces. The coalition forces, headed by Wekerle, were asked to form a govern-

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ment in 1906. The coalition government basically relied on conservative forces, including the Christian People’s Party and the Independence Party led by Apponyi. The main force within the government, however, was the National Party, which became part of the coalition under the name of the Constitutional Party. In the 1890s the Conservatives drew up comprehensive changes. Nevertheless, when they assumed power, like so many governments after 1867, they found they could not realize many of their plans. They were much too busy with the usual power struggles. Behind the scenes they were scheming to establish a one-party government again, and this time it was intended to incorporate the new, mainly Jewish, wealthy bourgeoisie. The new large-scale party, the National Labor Party, made its first appearance in the elections of 1910 and immediately gained an absolute majority. Its victory was so overwhelming that it could almost have established a one-party system.

VI. The Hungarian National Labor Party incorporated the Jewish wealthy bourgeoisie, finally making it possible for them to participate in politics. The new political pact represented a balance almost as delicate and rigid as the Compromise of 1867 and the party fusion in 1875—which foreshadowed the situation of 1910—when the two major parties of the large landowners formed a coalition. The landowners needed guarantees that as time passed the bourgeoisie would not want to take control and dominate the alliance. They knew that time was on the side of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but tried to do everything to prevent it from gaining the political power concomitant with its economic position. The landowners needed a guarantee that would assure them of long-term political power in accordance with the original agreement, notwithstanding the predictable shift in economic power in favor of the bourgeoisie. The condition the big landowners stipulated in return for the alliance was that the Jewish bourgeoisie never became Hungarian. They had to remain Jews so as never to challenge the nationalism of the Hungarian landowners as conceptualized by the liberal ideologists of the Hungarian nobility. By preventing the Jewish bourgeoisie from becoming Hungarian, the landowner nobility assured itself of the Hungarian identity and national image it had created and that it would never be challenged by a bourgeois form of nationalism. They wanted guarantees that the official nationalism they had created and which had already started to lean towards conservatism would never be replaced by a liberal or later by a democratic nationalism. It is not impossible to have two national identities within one political community. We can cite several examples from the same period of history. In France, for instance, besides the tricolor of the French Revolu-

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tion, the banner of Catholic–Royalist France, the fleurs-de-lis of the Bourbons was also in use. The Germans not only had two flags, but also two capitals. There were two Germanies: that of Potsdam on the one hand, and that of Weimar on the other. The Hungarian nobility demanded that everything possible be done to avoid the development of a similar situation. They claimed that the Hungarian national identity must be determined by the noble ruling class. Owning and controlling the national identity in the heyday of nation-states and national revivals meant everything: at that time, those who owned nationalism owned the country. Those who had the right to say what was Hungarian possessed considerable power. The manner in which it was asserted that Jews should never come to be regarded as Hungarians was both horrifying and simple: they had to remain Jews because they were considered to be Jews. It did not matter that the Jews in Hungary had become assimilated in every respect: they used Hungarian as their native language and many of them had even changed their name to sound more Hungarian. Nor did it matter that they had tried to adapt their religious rituals to the modern world; or that they had given up their traditional clothes and customs so as not to stand out in modern Hungarian society. They were not to be allowed to escape from the fact that they were not considered Hungarian: while Germans, Serbs, or Slovaks who assimilated came to be regarded as Hungarians of German, Serb, or Slovak origin, Hungarians of Jewish origin were simply Jews. However, the social influence of the Hungarian landowning nobility was not strong enough to impose this discrimination on broader public opinion. This task had to be undertaken by a very special social element. Liberalism had changed a lot in Hungary. In the 1910s the liberals advocated a protective tariff system. As a result of their customs policy and the beginning of preparations for war, taxes generally increased. All this led to a kind of étatism, the strengthening of state intervention, and the birth of a new type of political high bureaucracy, a kind of ‘classe politique.’ Refeudalization was not a Hungarian invention nor the heritage of the liberalism of the Hungarian nobility. The same phenomenon could be found everywhere, even in the most developed countries of the region. (The concept itself came from some left-wing theorists of the Weimar Republic, Emil Lederer, Carl Brinkmann, and Robert Michels.) The new political high bureaucracy had its socialization in its noble heritage. As preparations were made for war, Herbert Spencer’s philosophy became totally dysfunctional, with its dichotomy of “military society” and “industrial society.” The latter, with its anti-war mentality, became completely irrelevant. The theoreticians of the time had to look back to a tradition that idealized war, and the traditions of the nobility were perfect from this point of view. The new, combatant rightwing French politicians, who had shaped their ideas in the course of

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the struggles surrounding the Dreyfus case, went back to the same philosophical sources, as did the German Junker class. In Hungary, after the landowning gentry and the déclassé gentry, who had had to find themselves clerical and professional jobs, a new type of gentry emerged, the political gentry, which was able to climb to the top of the political bureaucracy. This political group was strong enough to determine society’s value system and to dictate strictly prescribed behavior-conventions. They provided a role model for society as a whole. This form of ‘gentry’ behavior was a role, as a second-rate bourgeois radical author, Geyza Farkas, recognized in his book Az úri rend (The Gentry), published in 1912. This was the prestige that Lajos Leopold, another civic radical author, determined as a unique category. This political gentry was able to socialize public opinion in such a fashion that the origin of the Jewish bourgeoisie could never be overlooked. The members of the classe politique were socialized to espouse extreme political views in their childhood. In this way they were made aware of their separateness and distinctness, and an élite consciousness was implanted in them. When they became adults, they became the functionaries of a number of moderate political movements. In the West this social role was played by the small communist parties: the members of the left-wing classe politique usually joined the Communist Party during their university years. After graduation they usually gave up their extreme views. In France, for example, they joined the Radical Party or became SFIO socialists. In America, this was the social origin of McCarthyism: the members of the Roosevelt administration were communists as students. Since the turn of the century, the right-wing classe politique in France had been socialized by the neo-royalist Action Française, which represented the extreme right. The young combatant rightists, when they grew up, became the functionaries of different right-wing government parties, such as those led by Tardieu, Flandin, or Poincaré. Since the turn of the century, the political élite of the Hungarian bureaucracy had been imbued, as youths, with the ideology of anti-Semitism. The institutions that took on this socializing role were the student organizations representing the belligerent version of political Catholicism. These young Catholic activists later became the leaders of the Hungarian National Labor Party, but they never gave up disseminating their conviction that the Hungarian bourgeois of Jewish origin were, after all, primarily Jews. The Jewish bourgeoisie tacitly accepted the situation. They accepted the liberal nobility’s interpretation of national identity as an authentic image of Hungarianness. They added a moderate cultural cosmopolitanism and European identity to distinguish themselves, but they did not emphasize these features very much. The capitalist wealthy bourgeoisie considered themselves lucky. They had had to pay a price, but

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they had got what they wanted: they were part of the political ruling class and they achieved this position without having had to fight. Bourgeois liberalism could not become the official ideology of the new political coalition. Its development stopped half way, when it became clear that the bourgeoisie had ‘postponed’—that is, no longer demanded—the theoretical product. After 1906 the bourgeois liberal theoretical workshops moved in the direction of bourgeois radicalism. Liberalism continued to be the ideology of the ruling coalition, at least on the surface. Although liberalism apparently did not change too much, its function had been transformed as a result of its new class content. The old, distorted ideology kept its dominant position, despite the fact that in many ways its tendency towards extremes had harmed its reputation, because the political situation it had ideologically to justify needed exactly what it had to offer: an ideology that was so weak, dated, and inapt that in effect it was no longer an ideology worthy of the name at all. This very lack of an ideology was the ideology of the ruling coalition. They needed a kind of paper doctrine with which to prevent other ideologies from stepping into the ideological vacuum. They were afraid that the ideological emptiness, as a result of the horror vacui effect, would suck in a real but dysfunctional ideology. István Tisza, after he had concluded the pact of the two ruling classes, followed a foreign pattern, the model of Bismarck, whom Tisza respected as a paragon. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, had made a similar pact between the large Junker landowners and the industrial bourgeoisie, first in Prussia in the 1860s, after the Prussian constitutional crisis, then, after 1871, in Germany as a whole. Both Bismarck and Tisza, although they did not completely surrender their ideological commitments, moderated their views (conservative and liberal, respectively), and subordinated them to a kind of raison d’état.’ In Germany this was partly in order to make the unification of Germany, which was executed “mit Blut und Eisen,” a little more coherent and acceptable. In Hungary the ruling classes tried to preserve the unity of the historical Hungary and their control over the nationalities. As the Compromise of 1867 seemed to guarantee both, raison d’état required the existence of the Ausgleich as well. In Germany the pact of the two ruling classes was realized in the form of a pact between two major political parties. The Junkers kept their Conservative party and the bourgeoisie their National Liberal Party. In Hungary the pact was realized within the framework of a one-party system. The liberalism of the nobility did not live to see the collapse of the monarchy. Slowly and almost invisibly it changed its function and transformed itself into something that was quite different from how it had looked years earlier. It was no longer liberal, but it was not conservative either. It became a kind of ‘negative ideology.’ It turned into a disintegrating, crumbling political culture based on Bismark’s Realpolitik.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Beksics, Gusztáv. 1882. Kemény Zsigmond, a forradalom s a kiegyezés [Zsigmond Kemény, the Revolution and the Compromise of 1867]. Budapest: Athenaeum. ———. 1884. Társadalmunk és nemzeti hivatásunk. [Our society and our national mission] Budapest: Zilahy. ———. 1907. A Szabadelvû Párt története [The history of the liberal party]. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap Nyomdája. Farkas, Geyza.1934. Az úri rend. [The gentry class] Budapest: Eggenberger. Kákay, Aranyos. 1869. Politikai-társadalmi tragico-humoristicus krónikája. [His political social tragico-ironical chronicle]. Pest: Ráth Mór. Kecskeméthy, Aurél. 1877. Éjszak Amerika 1876-ban [North America in 1876]. Budapest: Ráth Mór. ———. 1909. Naplója 1851-tôl 1878-ig. [Diary]. Budapest: Franklin Társulat. Kemény, Zsigmond. 1847. ‘Magyarország és Erdély’, [Hungary and Transylvania]. Pesti Hírlap (9 May). ———. 1908 [1850]. Forradalom után. [After the revolution]. Pest: Ráth Mór. Szabó, Miklós. 1983. Politikai gondolkodás és kultúra Magyarországon a dualizmus utolsó negyedszázadában. [Political thought and culture in Hungary during the last quarter of the dualist period] In Magyarország története tíz kötetben. 7. Magyarország története 1890-1918. 7/2. [The history of Hungary in ten volumes, The History of Hungary, 1890-1918] volume 7/2. Editor-in-chief: Péter Hanák, editor: Ferenc Mucsi. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, pp. 873– 1002. ——— 1989. Politikai kultúra Magyarországon 1896–1986. Válogatott tanulmányok. [Political culture in Hungary, 1896–1986. Selected essays] Budapest: Medvetánc könyvek, Atlantis program. ——— 1993. A magyar nemesi liberalizmus, 1825–1910. [The Hungarian gentry liberalism, 1825–1910]. In Szabadság és nemzet. Liberalizmus és nacionalizmus Közép- és Kelet-Európában. [Liberty and nation. Liberalism and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe]. Ed: I. Z. Dénes. Budapest: Gondolat. pp. 150–181. ——— 1995. Múmiák öröksége. Politikai és történeti esszék. [Legacy of mummies. Political and historical essays]. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. ——— 2000. Viszonylag békésen. [Relatively peacefully]. Budapest: Helikon Kiadó – Mozgó Világ. ——— 2001. Nemesi és polgári liberalizmus. [Gentry and bourgeois liberalism] In Filozófia és kultúra. Írások a modern magyar mûvelôdéstörténet körébôl. [Philosophy and culture. Essays on modern Hungarian intellectual history]. Ed.: Miklós Lackó. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete. pp. 113–164. ——— 2003. Az újkonzervativizmus és a jobboldali radikalizmus története (1867– 1918). [The history of new conservatism and right wing radicalism]. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó. Toldy, István. 1869. Pártjaink feladata a választások után. [The task of our parties after the elections]. Pest: Ráth Mór.

Marginal or Central? The Place of the Liberal Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Polish History MACIEJ JANOWSKI

I. Let us begin with a controversy, which arose in Polish historiography during the Enlightenment and is not likely to terminate in the foreseeable future: where does modern Poland come from? Is the modern civil society that has been (and still is) under construction in Poland with varying degrees of success for the last two centuries the immediate heir to the noble democracy of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? This continuity thesis has its roots in the Enlightenment, when some Polish reformers played with the idea of introducing equality before the law, not by curtailing the privileges of the gentry, but, on the contrary, by widening gentry status to the whole population. Thus, the whole nation would be ‘ennobled’ or ‘raised’ to the level of the nobility. This myth of noble democracy gradually widening its scope so as to embrace the whole nation was very much alive in the nineteenth century: for example, the great Romantic historian Joachim Lelewel sought to provide this view of the evolution of gentry democracy with scholarly arguments. At the same time, however, there existed another story, according to which the ancient Commonwealth was but a medieval anachronism, and the liberties of the gentry had nothing to do with modern liberal democratic ideals, being restricted to a single estate. Modern society, on this view, could be built not by developing particular features of ‘noble democracy,’ but, on the contrary, by replacing the obsolete institutions of the autonomous estates by unitary and centralized government, the only body able to enforce equality before the law and to replace the licentiousness of the magnates with an effective administrative system. This thesis was put forward by Adam Naruszewicz, the historian connected with the enlightened reformers gathered around King Stanislaus Augustus. The full scientific apparatus for this theory was provided by the historians from the so-called Cracow School in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both sides were (and still are) represented at various levels of sophistication, from popular stereotypes (an ‘inborn’ Polish democratism that must be nourished, on the one hand, and an ‘inborn’ Polish anarchic

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spirit that should be curbed, on the other) to elaborate historical or sociological theories. The history of this controversy is an important element of the history of Polish liberalism, and clearly shows the doubts which exist concerning its historical identity. Its importance, however, does not end here: despite its obvious political undertones, the problem is serious and demands rational investigation. If we come to the conclusion that gentry democracy formed a favorable environment for the development of modern liberal ideas, then our evaluation of Polish nineteenth-century liberalism must be very different from what it would be if we took the view that modern liberalism was the outcome of enlightened centralist reforms. Obviously, the problem is far from being specific to Poland. Modern liberal ideas everywhere in Europe are the offspring of two parents: (i) the freedoms of the late medieval estates, and (ii) early modern absolutism. The Polish case did have its special features, however, since the estate tradition had grown to immense proportions, dominating the whole of public life, while the tradition of enlightened absolutism was practically absent up to the beginning of the reform era in the 1760s.

II. At least some defenders of noble privileges may seem fairly liberal. “Every authority looks for greater power; every king looks for unlimited power. This is so natural to humankind that it does not befit anybody to doubt it,” wrote one of the leaders of the conservative opposition to enlightened reform, Seweryn Rzewuski, in an interesting pamphlet defending the principle of an elective monarchy. This phrase is clearly similar to the famous bon mot of Lord Acton concerning absolute power which corrupts absolutely. We are likely to be still more impressed by the author’s enthusiasm for the destruction of the Bastille, “that awful symbol of monarchic absolutism.” It is only when we come to the author’s fears that the absolute monarch “sues the nobleman in court” or causes the peasantry to rise up against the landowners that we begin to be aware of the sense of social exclusivity of this conservative magnate (Rzewuski, n. d.). Outwardly liberal quotations are available in great numbers, especially from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are a number of important factors which make the estate system of gentry democracy substantially different from modern liberal democracy, however. To start with, the very notion of government was absent. The concept of governmental prerogative that permits the ruler to take political decisions within certain limits (a concept elaborated in Locke’s Two Treatises on Government) was alien to the gentry mentality; the monarch, between Diet sessions, had only to administer justice and take care of

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enforcing existing laws. It may be considered symbolic that the most important movement for political reform in the old Commonwealth was known as the ‘Execution Movement’ (sixteenth century): its declared aim was to ‘execute’ the ‘good old laws,’ rather than to introduce new ones. The political imagination of the Polish gentry was directed backwards, as in the case of medieval heresies, not forwards, as in the case of modern political ideologies. The very notion of unitary citizenship was obviously lacking. As everywhere under the rule of German municipal law, the burghers were citizens only of their own town, not of an abstract ‘burgher estate,’ let alone the Commonwealth as a whole; the case with the nobility was similar, as every nobleman was a terrigena, a citizen of his own land (terra). This legal fragmentation of the concept of citizenship was part of a wider phenomenon. The unitary sovereign state was weak, not only in practice, but in terms of its theoretical underpinning. The regional dietines (sejmiki) were more like small sovereign parliaments than organs of local self-government; the central Diet resembled a congress of representatives rather than a unitary legislature. This may explain the strength of the famous Liberum Veto, or principle of unanimity. Some historians have described this phenomenon as the ‘decentralization of sovereignty.’ Translating this legal concept into the language of social structures, a renowned sociologist has conceived a vision of the old Commonwealth as a “federation of neighborhoods” (ZajΩczkowski, 1967). As a result, the elements of the estate system, as a common heritage of the European political tradition, assumed in Poland–Lithuania a singular form, surviving longer than elsewhere and regulating the whole of political life up to the late eighteenth century. This is not to deny that some features of the old system may have been helpful to the growth of modern liberal ideology and practice. The analogies should be sought, however, in vague traditions and attitudes to public participation rather than in any specific institutional or intellectual continuity. The generation of enlightened reformers that emerged in the 1760s (when King Stanislaus Augustus came to the throne) had to construct an entirely new political culture. They had to implant the belief in the possibility of progress in place of admiration of the gentry’s way of life and the Baroque vision (medieval in its origins) of the ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Whereas Polish Baroque culture had been preoccupied with existential and metaphysical questions, the generation of the Enlightenment had to awaken interest in social and economic problems. This is not to say that the Baroque was in any way ‘inferior’ to the Enlightenment: the great streams of European culture have their own hierarchies of values that are not easily interchanged. It is simply that the Baroque ‘paradigm’ had to be replaced by the Enlightenment one if the birth of modern liberalism was to be at all possible. “Poland is still in the fif-

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teenth century, while the rest of Europe is already finishing the eighteenth!” (Staszic, 1926, p. 192). This exclamation by Stanislaw Staszic opened the way to modern social, economic, and political thought in Poland.

1. A few years ago, Jerzy Szacki analyzed the opportunities and challenges of liberal ideology in postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe. In his view, liberal ideology has been placed by the collapse of communism in a thoroughly new situation. An ideology which by definition is anticonstructivist, relying on individual industry and activism, was the obvious candidate to serve as the main ideological justification of the transition to capitalism and democracy. But as the transitional period required intensive state action in order to reconstruct the social and political framework, liberal ideology had somehow to justify étatist policies (Szacki, 1995, p. 210 and passim). The present chapter aims to show that it is not only in the late twentieth century that liberal ideology has faced the temptations of constructivism and étatism. It did so in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe; indeed, we may perhaps say that these temptations have been a constant element of liberal ideology in most periods and most regions, forming an important counterpart to the doctrine of laissez-faire. Its presence is not devoid of theoretical prerequisites within the doctrine itself. The Hobbesian tradition provided the junction between the idea of an absolutist state and liberal (or, more correctly, proto-liberal) tenets of equality before the law, economic freedom, and a secular type of power legitimization. Hobbes wrote his famous treatise in the midst of the English Civil War, and his abhorrence of anarchy was clearly influenced by the political situation (Bobbio, 1993, pp. 29–30).1 It is worth noting that the Polish Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century developed under similar conditions: the threat of anarchy was felt as strongly as in Hobbes’s time, although the reason was the anarchic structure of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth rather than civil war. The Polish thinker who did most to imbue the Polish liberal tradition with an abhorrence of anarchy was probably Stanis°aw Staszic (1755–1826), who—toute proportion gardée—could probably be described as the ‘Polish Hobbes,’ not on account of the depth of his political ideas (although his thought is by no means uninteresting), but rather because of his preoccupation with the necessity of strong central government as a prerequisite of a modern civil society. In Przestrogi dla

1

On Hobbes’ relation to liberalism, see Rapaczynski, 1987.

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Polski (footnote 3) Staszic acknowledged the truth of Seweryn Rzewuski’s argument that an elective monarchy is more friendly to liberty than an hereditary one. Staszic goes on to say, however, that “[Rzewuski’s] work has awakened in me, against my will … the following idea: is it not necessary that we submit, for a time, to an autocracy that would make us a little more equal and eradicate all these old prejudices?” (Staszic, 1926, p. 208f). This dilemma was to haunt Polish liberals in various forms throughout the nineteenth century and even later. Most of the pieces of the puzzle which was to be completed in around 1815, and which bears the name of Polish liberalism, were already present in the eighteenth century. For example, they can be found in the most famous intellectual periodical of the epoch, The Monitor, published in Warsaw between 1764 and 1785, following the example of the English Spectator. There were attempts to change the hierarchy of social values by advocating education as a means of social mobility; there was also hope that an urban ‘middle estate’ would emerge, seen as the natural ally of reform, and of cultural and economic development. Some texts betray the self-consciousness of their authors as belonging to a specific group of ‘literates’—this was the birth of the Polish intelligentsia, though as yet without a name (Aleksandrowska, 1976). The debates regarding the economic situation had done much to provide public discourse in Poland with the vocabulary which would later be used by the liberals. A school handbook of ‘natural and political law, economy, and the law of nations,’ published in 1785 (the author was one of the leading Polish physiocrats, the Piarist priest Hieronim Stroynowski), introduced a whole range of concepts related to free trade, freedom of contract, natural law, and so on. Although physiocrat ideals were often evoked by the Polish publicists of the late eighteenth century, on more detailed questions German Cameralism was perhaps a greater influence. In spite of the great ideological influence of the French Enlightenment, the economic situation of the Commonwealth much more closely resembled the German lands, especially to the east of the Elbe. Cameralist theories could not be put into practice in Poland due to the weakness of central power, but the reformers’ conceptions were clearly influenced by them. Perhaps the most interesting single work of the ‘proto-liberal’ stream of the Polish Enlightenment was the Anonymous Letters of Hugo Ko°°Ωtaj (1750–1812). Both in form and in content the Letters resemble a work that appeared almost exactly at the same time, the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Both have the form of letters published on the eve of great constitutional reform; both advocate reforms directed at centralization of the political system as a necessary precondition of liberty. Neither the regenerating Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth nor the emerging United States of America

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had passed through a centralizing phase of political absolutism; it was necessary, therefore, to start by creating a unitary body politic as a framework for the further development of liberal institutions. In other words, the liberal reformers themselves had to do the work that had been carried out by enlightened absolutism in France or in the German lands. The Constitution of 3 May 1791 did not realize all of the reformers’ wishes. The burghers of royal towns were given partial political rights, and, at the same time, the landless gentry was deprived of the right to vote. All this was an attempt to replace the old, hereditary elite with an elite based on property and individual merit. The essence of the political reforms was the introduction of the majority vote in the Diet (abolition of the principle of unanimity, the famous Liberum Veto), as well as of a hereditary (instead of an elective) monarchy. The constitution did not survive long; the second partition of Poland (1793) annulled most of the new order and the third partition brought the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to an end. The memory of the May Constitution did supply an important national myth, however, namely, that the old Commonwealth was not incapable of reforming itself.

2. As a result of the partitions Russia took almost all Lithuanian and Ukrainian territories; most of central Poland, together with Warsaw and Pozna≈, was annexed by Prussia, while the southern part, including Cracow, Lviv, and Lublin, was taken by the Habsburg monarchy. Napoleon’s victories changed the political map of Europe, leading in 1807 to the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, including part of the Prussian Partition (with Warsaw and Pozna≈, but without access to the sea). In 1809 the Duchy was enlarged with part of Austrian Poland, including Lublin and Cracow. The Grand Duchy was to a high degree a model Napoleonic satellite state, with a centralized administration employing professional civil servants; the Diet played a very limited role. For the veteran reformers of the pre-partition period this system seemed ideal, progressing far beyond their hopes of the period before 1795. Their old enemy ‘feudal anarchy’ or ‘exclusivity’ was destroyed and replaced by a unitary and strong government. Ko°°Ωtaj, extremely enthusiastic about the new institutions, admired even the replacement of the traditional term województwo by the new French départment as the appellation of the principal administrative unit: whereas the old term was redolent of the hated federalism, the new name had connotations of order, reason, and efficiency ([Ko°°Ωtaj], 1808, pp.180–82). The enlightened reformers quickly came to terms with the lack of political liberty under the Napoleonic regime: in their view, the main enemy of individual freedom and well-being was not the government,

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but feudalism, that is, the estate system under which the individual is kept in the chains of compulsory corporations which determine his place in society. Strong government, introducing equality before the law and destroying the privileges of the estates, is the best ally of individual freedom. This is the explanation of the seeming paradox that Napoleonic propaganda (not only in Poland) used the phraseology of individualism and liberty to legitimize authoritarian policies. The ideas of the enlightened rulers of the Grand Duchy led to a conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. The hierarchy longed for the privileged status enjoyed by the Church before 1795, criticizing the Napoleonic Code, especially civil marriages and the possibility of divorce. On the other hand, the government, conscious of the weakness of state structures, aspired to place the administrative machinery of the Church at the service of the state. The parish was to form the lowest unit of state administration; the priest, apart from his pastoral duties, should keep records of births, deaths, and marriages, announce from the pulpit new laws and decrees, and teach the children in the parish school not only the rudiments of knowledge, but also their duties towards the government. All this contained the seeds of conflict: if the priest is at the same time the teacher, and if the parish registers are to serve the aims of the state (taxation, recruitment, and so on), then obviously the marriage rules of church and state must be identical; the ideology spread from the pulpit must be that of the state, and the government must control the seminaries. The ruling elite of the Grand Duchy did not consider itself anticlerical, let alone irreligious; it simply considered the autonomy of the Church as one of those feudal exclusivities, analogous with the special rights of nobility or provincial privileges. They were remnants of the Dark Ages, to be swept away by an enlightened government. The practical impact of the conflict should not be overstressed, as both the bishops and the ministers understood the unique opportunity presented to Poland by the Napoleonic order and did not try to push things too far. The conflict itself is of interest, however, as the standpoints of both sides were to resound through the nineteenth century and even later. By and large, there were two possible positions within the attitude of what are imprecisely called ‘progressive’ circles in Europe towards the Christian churches (especially towards Roman Catholicism): one, taking its phraseology from the French Revolution, demanded the marginalization of the Church and tried to reduce its influence in schools, hospitals, and so on; the other, which could be imprecisely called ‘Josephinist,’ far from attempting to eliminate the Church’s influence, welcomed its social activities, provided that they were fully controlled by the state—the Church, with its developed structures and age-old experience, was to became an important instrument of modernization.

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It is essential to stress that although the Grand Duchy of Warsaw borrowed the language of politics from Napoleonic France, its attitude towards the Church was based strictly on the Josephinist model. The case was the same with almost all the Polish liberal tendencies up to the early twentieth century. This attitude, more conciliatory than that of the French revolutionaries, was a sui generis bid for a compromise, and one that was to be repeated many times through the nineteenth century. It was never realized due to mutual distrust and totally different ways of thinking about society and politics; the ‘enlightened’ wanted to limit the Church to its earthly activities, turning a blind eye to its spiritual functions, whereas the Church suspected attacks on religion to be behind even the smallest criticism of its privileges. It was not only in their church policies that the ‘enlightened’ derived their ideas from the German lands. In economic and social policy they benefited from German administrative science (Polizeiwissenschaft). Their enthusiasm for bureaucracy, often expressed in quasi-lyrical exclamations, did not hamper their conviction that strong government will best ensure freedom, progress, and happiness. Needless to say, none of this was as yet liberalism. It was, however, preparation of the ground for its arrival. The ‘enlightened’ understood that the slogans of individual freedom and limited government, in the absence of economic development and modernization, could serve only as a shelter for stagnation and retention of estate privileges. This was the case with the gentry opposition at the Diets of the Grand Duchy in 1809 and 1811, which complained about high taxes and prices. It was only when the ideas of the enlightened, centralized, and efficient government came together with the notion of a legal antigovernment opposition that Polish liberalism can be said to have been born. This occurred only after Napoleon’s fall.

3. The decisions of the Congress of Vienna (1815) concerning the Polish question represented an interesting attempt to secure relatively free national development without the restoration of independent statehood. The majority of the areas belonging to the former Grand Duchy of Warsaw were transformed into the Kingdom of Poland, tied, as the Treaty of Vienna put it, “for ever to Russia by its constitution.” The Western territories of the Grand Duchy were given to Prussia as the Grand Duchy of Pozna≈, with its own coat of arms, governor, and estate Diet. Cracow and its surroundings became a free town under the protectorate of the three Powers, with a relatively liberal constitution (it was annexed by Austria in 1846). All the areas formerly belonging to the

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Commonwealth were to be given imprecise national institutions; this stipulation, however, remained on paper. The constitution of the Kingdom of Poland declared equality before the law, personal immunity, and freedom of speech and conscience, and ensured a representative system. Through the bestowal of the constitution and the unofficial promises to join the eastern parts of the former Commonwealth to the new Kingdom, the Emperor and King Alexander enjoyed significant popularity among the Polish elites after 1815. The old elites of the enlightened centralists did not change their opinions after 1815. They professed admiration for Alexander in the same way as they had for Napoleon, and believed that the government of the Kingdom would prove as salutary as the government of the former Grand Duchy. They often revived the memory of Habsburg emperor Joseph II and of Prussian king Frederick the Great, thus placing themselves in the tradition of enlightened absolutism. It was precisely at that time that they obtained a new and fashionable term for these opinions: ‘liberal.’ Rajmund Rembieli≈ski, one of the group, used the adjective ‘liberal’ in 1815 when describing the reforms of Frederick the Great in Prussia. Stanislaw W¡grzecki (1765–1845), a convinced Josephinist in matters of religion and one of the greatest enthusiasts of modern state administration, used the noun ‘liberalno√∆’ [liberality] when describing his own opinions in 1818 (Barszczewska-Krupa, 1989, p. 177; W¡grzecki, 1818, p. 174). As late as 1843 the unknown author of a study of the peasant question described the agrarian reforms of Joseph II as “pervaded with a liberal spirit”—although, as the author was a conservative, it was meant as criticism, not praise (n. a., 1843, p. 120). The meaning of the term ‘liberal’ after 1815 clearly had much in common with centralization, modernization, and enlightened absolutism. This was not the only meaning of the term, however. In January 1816 the most serious Warsaw monthly, Pamietnik Warszawski (Warsaw Memoir), published an anonymous article entitled ‘What Do Liberal Ideas Mean?’ (Co znaczΩ wyobra¿enia liberalne). (The text is not original, as it has a close German muster. This, however, does not diminish its importance within the Polish context.) With reference to Cicero, the author considered “careful upbringing and an independent existence” to be the basic liberal values. This is where elegance of dress and behavior and a readiness to help one’s neighbor come from. “A political opinion is a liberal one if it concurs with the moral aim of a human being … if it intends to secure the public liberty and rights of the whole society against the unlawful power of individuals … if it is worthy, not of a courtier, but of a citizen of a state, of an active and independent member of the political family… The liberal government allows resistance or opposition; more, it considers it indispensable, first,

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because only open resistance demonstrates the existence of political freedom; secondly, because the disputes of the Ministers with the opposition highlight the faults of the former and reveal to the government the general conditions and popular feeling.” The supporter of liberal opinions is a monarchist and disdains the French revolutionaries who had “sent a monarch, liberty’s best friend, to the scaffold.” The pattern of Whiggish aristocratic liberalism is clearly recognizable; the author quotes the English phrase “gentlemanly appearance” as the best equivalent of the Latin liberalis facies. The liberal ideal is the ideal of a gentleman. The differences between all this and the ideas discussed earlier should be evident at first glance. Not a word is said about economic development or the need for a central government; the enlightened centralists would surely have disdained the ideal of the gentleman as too ‘feudal,’ aristocratic, and close to the hated ‘exclusivity.’ They would certainly not have liked the idea of political opposition, as it would have reminded them of the ‘anarchy’ of the old Commonwealth (opposition is built into the British constitution, but in Poland it would only be a hindrance, wrote Ko°°Ωtaj in 1808). It is not possible to divide Polish liberal thought after 1815 into clearcut tendencies, one ‘Whiggish’ and the other ‘centralist.’ They were professed by members of the same elite educated in Enlightenment ideas, and the same people expressed one or another set of views at various times, probably not even noticing the difference. The ‘centralist’ version of liberalism suffered a grave blow in the years 1819–20. This period witnessed a retreat from liberal ideas in many parts of Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany). In the Kingdom of Poland the government introduced censorship, so putting an end to the fruitful development of liberal journalism. The outlawing of freemasonry was another mark of the new conservative course, as was the dismissal of the liberal minister of education, Stanislaw Kostka Potocki (whom some historians consider a possible author of the text in Pami¡tnik Warszawski, discussed above). ‘Centralist’ liberalism began to lose ground when the government ceased its support for the ideals of the Enlightenment.

4. At the same time, in 1820 a full-fledged liberal party made its appearance at the Diet of the Kingdom—the first regular liberal political party with parliamentary representation in Central and Eastern Europe. It originated in the region of Kalisz in the Western part of the Kingdom, not far from the border with Prussian Poland. The region was among the best developed economically, and the gentry had a better than average edu-

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cation. Kalisz itself was considered second only to the capital Warsaw. The initiators of the movement, the brothers Wincenty and Bonawentura Niemojowski, assembled a circle of followers and managed to enter the Diet of 1820 with a number of supporters. Their parliamentary career was neither long nor significant: the Emperor–King Alexander, outraged by the parliamentary opposition, did not convoke the Diet again until 1825 (although the constitution obliged him to do so every 2 years), and then the Niemojowskis were forbidden by the police to appear at the sessions. The Callisians were not creative political thinkers: they were admirers of Benjamin Constant, but even their reception of French ideas was not new in Poland. The main tenets of Western liberal constitutionalism—such as trial by jury, the King who ‘can do no wrong’ since all his decrees are co-signed by a responsible minister, and the salutary role of a free press and public opinion—were present in numerous works published in Polish after 1815. What was important was to put these elements together and to present them not only as a unitary doctrine, but also as a basis for practical politics. Thus the connection between enlightenment ideas and the tradition of old noble parliamentarism was fulfilled, and Polish liberalism was born. Due to the conservative turn in the Kingdom’s politics around 1820, the liberal ‘centralists’ had to find their place in the parliamentary opposition; even so staunch supporter of a strong bureaucracy as Stanis°aw W¡grzecki found his place among the Callisians’ sympathizers. The gap between both wings of the liberal movement was not surmounted, but lost much of its importance. ‘Gentry liberalism’ in its clearest form manifested itself at the Diet of 1830, at which the leaders of the Callisians were not present: the committees elected by both houses presented their ‘Observations’ on the government’s report on the state of the country. These observations are an excellent example of the gentry ideology expressed in terms of the liberal political language of the Enlightenment. The members and senators regretted the growth of bureaucracy, taxes, and state monopolies; their ideal was a ‘cheap state’ in which government spending would be covered by incomes from the royal demesne, and would as much as possible be done by elected—and unpaid—local government officials. Although they were realistic enough not to propose a return to such a state of affairs, they tried to cut expenditure as much as possible, taking care that state economic policy should favor agriculture and, especially, that tariffs should not hamper the export of agricultural products; they also defended the landowner’s right to brew vodka. The principal opponent of this standpoint was the finance minister responsible for fiscal policy, Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki. The ‘Observations’ are far from being a primitive defense of landed interests. Their authors use sophisticated argumentation, stress the

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necessity of education and industrial development, know the Ricardian theory of international exchange, quote statistics to back up their opinions, and are sure that both reason and progress support their demands.2 Here may be the proper place to ponder the problem of the liberalism of the nobility. According to the theory, developed by Hungarian historians in particular, the nobility sometimes played the role of a middle class in countries where, as in Hungary or Poland, the urban middle class was too weak to lead liberal politics. This theory is questionable: in practical terms, the greatest problem is how to distinguish the oldfashioned defense of estate liberties from ‘modern’ liberal ideas: absolutism may be opposed both from the right, in defense of privileges, and from the left, in defense of liberty for all. The texts written by the liberal nobility in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century are clearly problematic from this point of view. It is not merely a penchant for pedantic systems that makes this question important: the manner of a given text’s interpretation depends on the context and intellectual tradition in which it is placed. In the case of the liberal nobility in the Kingdom of Poland after 1815, it is the relative sophistication of the liberals’ argumentation, their knowledge of the political ideas of the Western Enlightenment, and their clear self-identification as liberals that determine their position in the spectrum of liberal thought. In Poland—unlike Hungary—‘gentry liberalism,’ supporting laissez-faire doctrines, agrarian and anticentralist, was only a temporary phenomenon, and never enjoyed much influence after 1830. The lack of political institutions within the framework of which the gentry could develop its ideas (such as the county assemblies in Hungary) is probably one of the main reasons for this. The branch of Enlightenment thinking that formed the intellectual basis of Polish liberal thought was neither radical nor revolutionary. The influence of Constant has been noted; the favorite philosophy was British empiricism and the Scottish ‘philosophy of common sense.’ The Polish liberals borrowed from Locke their theory of cognition and discovered Francis Bacon’s method of induction after a delay of two centuries. Neo-classical aesthetics was also supposed to be closely connected with liberal politics: according to Stanis°aw Kostka Potocki, the anarchy of government in ancient Poland had its parallel in the impurity of the ´ literary style of the period (Potocki, 1816, 429); whereas Jan Sniadecki, a professor at Vilna University, obviously meant to defend political sta2

The ‘Observations’ were recently published in an edition by J. Leskiewiczowa and F. Ramotowska, Sejm Królestwa Polskiego o dzia°alno√ci rzΩdu i stanie kraju 1816–1830 [The Diet of the Kingdom of Poland on the government’s activities and the state of the country] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, 1995), pp. 261–438.

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bility when he appealed to the Poles to stick to Locke’s views in philosophy and Boileau’s (the famous author of The Art of Poetry) canons in literature. Appeals of this kind were all the more important as Romanticism was already in the air.

5. The great debate between the Classicists and the Romantics took place in the late 1820s; but it was by no means merely a dispute about aes´ thetics. Sniadecki, a tough rationalist, wrote some moving sentences in defense of reason against what he perceived as the new wave of barbarity and the revival of superstition. The leader of the Kalisz Liberals, Wincenty Niemojowski, supported him in attacking Romanticism on the same grounds. Such attitudes were not uncommon among the supporters of the Enlightenment tradition. Similar opinions were resurrected at the end of the nineteenth century when a new irrationalism challenged the rule of positivist ideas; they were also present in the late 1930s in the face of the triumph of Nazism; and they are clearly visible in our own time, with rationalist and neopositivist tendencies fighting the overwhelming tide of postmodernism. Knowing what we now know about Polish Romanticism, it is easy to ´ see that Sniadecki’s pessimism was unfounded. Romanticism did indeed renounce the Reason of the Enlightened, but it did not introduce anarchy and license in its place. The moral task of regaining Polish nationhood disciplined the Polish Romantics, subjugating the ideal of un´ bounded individual self-expression to this higher goal. Sniadecki and his enlightened contemporaries, however, saw only a destructive force that, if unleashed, would tear away the thin layer of culture and education that covered, thanks to the defiance of two enlightened generations, the ´ huge edifice of ‘gothic barbarity.’ Sniadecki’s warnings would have been much more important seventy years later, if anybody had taken notice of them.3 Even if the danger was not as strong or immediate as the enlightened generation imagined, there was, undoubtedly, a serious intellectual problem: the popularity of Romantic ideas was a European phenomenon and the change of sensibilities made it necessary for liberal intellectuals to justify their views in a new way. The Polish uprising of November 1830, resulting in part from the Romanticism of the younger generation, shook both classicist dominance and the Polish–Russian compromise that formed one of the bases of the constitutional Kingdom of Poland. It was during the uprising that an interesting theoretical essay appeared in one 3

See the useful anthology Walka romantykòw z klasykami [The struggle between the Romantics and the Classicists], ed. S. Kawyn (Wroc°aw, 1960), passim.

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of the daily newspapers. This essay, entitled ‘The Old and the New Liberalism’ (n.a., 1831) distinguished between an earlier liberalism, based on the principles of the Enlightenment, and a new one that borrowed from the ideas of Vico and Schelling. The ‘new’ liberals were sure that every epoch has specific ideas and values that are peculiar to it; that the ‘outworn’ ideas of a former epoch must give place to those of the new one, which, in turn, shall be replaced by another and higher age. The Enlightenment, which did not pay due attention to national differences, had to yield to the new wave of ideas. This reasoning marks a new epoch. Progress is not linear but dialectical; propositions and opinions are justified by the extent to which they harmonize with the spirit of the age, not by their universal validity. The particular (local and temporary) is opposed to the universal. At the same time, the political content of the essay is far from revolutionary: indeed, its air is very similar to pre-1830 anti-étatist gentry liberalism, whereas the criticism of the Enlightenment is obviously directed at the centralist-étatist program already discussed. But the mildness of the political content is far less important than the mode of argumentation. This little known text deserves closer attention, since it indicates a developmental path for Polish intellectual history that it did not take: the peaceful absorption of Romantic style and phraseology into the old political and ideological debates. History took another route; brutal repressions after the collapse of the uprising interrupted the course of Polish intellectual evolution and radicalized the political attitudes of the Polish elites. Not only the justification of ideas, but the ideas themselves had to be profoundly changed, or at least regenerated. The 1830s were barren years in Poland, with the universities in Warsaw and Vilna closed, and practically all intellectual life in exile (especially in Paris) due to repression at home. It was only in the 1840s that the liberalized conditions in Prussian Poland under Frederick William IV permitted the revival of public debate, this time very much influenced by German idealist philosophy. The historians tended to connect Polish Romantic Messianism with nationalism rather than liberalism. The Messianism developed in Prussian Poland in the 1840s, however, had a number of features which distinguished it from that of the exiles (notably Adam Mickiewicz). Karol Libelt (1807–75) and August Cieszkowski (1814–94) were both Romantic philosophers and interesting writers on social and economic subjects. They were no friends of laissez-faire (“let us apply the principle laissez passer to this very principle,” and let it pass away, wrote Cieszkowski [1844, p. 3]), nor did they rely too much on the state, as their predecessors, the enlightened centralists of the early nineteenth century, had done. They preferred to regenerate society, providing the theoretical basis for the movement which started in the region of Pozna≈ in the late 1830s, when a group of provincial gentry

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established a casino in the small town of Gosty≈. The casino was to serve as the focus for the social life of the gentry, but—as so often in similar circumstances—it came to be a lot more, turning into a sort of intellectual center. The periodical Przewodnik rolniczo-przemys°owy (Guide to agriculture and industry) started in 1836 as a technical publication to advise landowners wishing to modernize their estates, but it soon embraced wider social issues as well. New periodicals soon appeared, both in Prussian and in Russian Poland. Their main focus was social and economic, for two reasons: first, no open political discussion was possible under the censorship; secondly, modernization was becoming more and more of an influence in the Polish lands, and socio-economic questions seemed increasingly important. “We live in an epoch of complete change… Formerly, countries and individuals could isolate themselves… and manage their economy as they liked. Now knowledge, trade, and even politics are so accessible to everybody, they unite all the peoples together and call everybody to compete. Those who are not willing to participate in the race are left behind. It is not easy for latecomers, stuck at the back of so great a crowd of runners, to find nourishment” (n.a., 1836, p. 339). How could the fate of the latecomers be avoided? This question was to trouble Polish liberals more and more frequently. Libelt, Cieszkowski and their contemporaries advocated economic development with an admixture of Messianic ideology. Economic achievement was seen as the realization of God’s plan and a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, in a way reminiscent of Weber’s view of the early Calvinists.

6. Liberal parlance in Prussian Poland in the 1840s acquired two extremely important concepts that were to remain part and parcel of Polish liberal ideology ever after: ‘organic work’ (praca organiczna) and ‘intelligentsia.’ The second of these terms was used for the first time in the Polish language to denote a particular social group in the early 1840s. Its origins are clearly Hegelian: a mental feature is ‘objectivized’ and used to denote a class that is supposed to be a special bearer of this feature. The term came from German to Polish, and by the 1860s was borrowed in turn by the Russian language, only to return triumphantly from Russia to Western European languages by the end of the nineteenth century. The social group denoted by this term existed earlier; its birth as a self-conscious group of urban intellectuals may be traced to the Enlightenment. It was, however, only in the 1840s that it formed a separate and clearcut stratum with its own aims and values, different from (if not necessarily inimical to) those of the gentry. These aims and values were best expressed by another phrase that appeared roughly at the same time:

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‘organic work,’ a collective term for the activities that serve the modernization of society and the economy—but only those undertaken by society itself, in contrast to the actions of state institutions. Thus, cooperatives and agricultural circles, educational associations, and cultural initiatives such as subsidies for poor students and scholars, together with important publishing and journalistic activities—all this, and much more, came under the umbrella notion of ‘organic work’ (Jedlicki, 1997, pp. 375–77).4 The program of organic work could be accompanied by liberal, conservative, or, later, also nationalist, Christian social, and even social democratic political ideas, to name but the most important ones. By and large, the conservatives hoped to use it to keep social activities in check and so retain control of events. For the nationalists, it was a tool for the development of social discipline, the organization of the people, and the diffusion of the national idea. Probably only the liberals advocated ‘organic work’ more or less for its own sake: if they established, say, a co-operative, it was usually with the genuine intention of improving the material level of the poorest stratum, with the longer term aim of preparing the ground for future economic growth. It was in Prussian Poland in the 1840s that the new class, the intelligentsia, embraced this new idea. The process took over the Kingdom of Poland and Austrian Galicia in the 1850s. Then, however, the ideological justification began to change. Romantic Messianism influenced by German idealist philosophy was losing its grip on the intellectuals after its brief triumph in the Revolution of 1848, and gave way to positivist ideas (in a sense, a revival of Enlightenment thought, which seemed to have lost the battle of ideas a generation earlier). This rationalist revival of the 1850s in Poland was not paid adequate attention by the majority of historians until fairly recently. Under the impression of the great rift of the fatal insurrection of 1863, they saw it as a mighty accord ending the epoch of Polish Romanticism. The leading representative of this rationalist revival was undoubtedly Józef Supi≈ski (1804–93), one of the most interesting nineteenthcentury Polish economists belonging to the liberal tradition. He will be discussed in more detail not because he was the most eminent Polish liberal, but simply to provide a profile of at least one notable personality. Supi≈ski may serve to illustrate the economic ideas of the Polish nineteenth-century liberals. These ideas turned full circle, starting with the étatist Cameralism of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and ending with the semi-socialist étatism of the Progressive Democracy after 1905 (see

4

On ‘organic work’ see Kizwalter and Skowronek, 1988, a useful anthology with an extensive introduction.

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below). In the meantime, however, many liberals retained a fascination with laissez-faire that lasted from the 1820s to the 1880s. There was only a temporary revival of interventionist ideas in the 1840s, after the example of French utopian socialists (August Cieszkowski was strongly influenced by them)—unlike in Hungary, Friedrich List’s protectionist doctrines were not noticeably influential at that time. Supi≈ski was, by and large, a sworn supporter of laissez-faire economics; at the same time, however, he clearly understood the specificity of economic backwardness and the necessity of introducing special measures in order to deal with it. His main works (published in Galicia) include My√l ogólna fizjologii wszech√wiata (General idea of universal physiology) (1855), an attempt to create, under clear Comtean influence, an all-embracing sociological system, and (more interestingly for us) Szko°a polska gospodarstwa spo°ecznego (Polish school of social economy), of which only the first volume appeared, in two parts, between 1862 and 1865.5 The laws of economics are as binding as the laws of physics, wrote Supi≈ski, only they are unobtrusive; if you disregard the laws of physics (for example, by putting your hand into hot water) you are punished immediately, whereas when you disregard economic laws you enjoy a seeming impunity for a time, only to see objective economic realities ultimately take their revenge. People should learn the true nature of economic laws (from Supi≈ski’s own books, for example) and start to behave accordingly. Supi≈ski was only ostensibly a supporter of laissez-faire. He did not believe that individuals trying to maximize their immediate personal gain would automatically trigger national economic growth, and he held that people should, for a time, abandon their striving for immediate gain in order to promote the general welfare. What distinguished him from the supporters of a protectionist economic policy was his belief that changes in human behavior can be effected not only by constraints but also by the diffusion of economic knowledge. Judged by the standards of the best economic theory of his time, his recipes were neither original nor precise. In the wake of Adam Smith’s well-known reflections in the last book of The Wealth of Nations, Supi≈ski believed that every country can—and should—develop a modern capitalist economy gradually, observing a particular sequence, starting with the modernization of agriculture, then the fostering of craftsmanship, which, in turn, will develop into modern industry. Any attempts to industrialize before the proper time would only bring trouble, wasting scarce and dearly-won capital. Thus, if foreign capitalists wish to invest in railways in Poland, all well and good; if not, Polish capitalists should

5

Supi≈ski, 1883. The quotations in the text are identified by reference [in brackets] to the volume and page of this edition.

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not take the risk themselves, but rather—as already noted—confine themselves to the development of crafts and agriculture. There are, Supi≈ski writes, three roads open to a farmer trying to better his lot. He may invest money (by buying machines, and so on) in order to increase his crops and income; he may introduce innovations which do not require increased spending (such as changes in the kinds of crop produced), but result in increased income; or he may try to implement savings and reduce expenditures without diminishing income (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. III, p. 84). The first route is suitable for countries rich in capital—the other two are good for Poland. Obviously, the farmer must be educated in order to be able to pursue any of them, so education—as with almost all Polish liberals—is the key to economic and social progress. Apart from technical knowledge, education should spread suitable attitudes, such as a ‘work ethic’ and a minimal acceptable level of material possessions. Supi≈ski did not share the opinion, later so eloquently advocated by Werner Sombart, that striving for luxury is among the chief engines of economic growth; like the whole Polish liberal tradition, he often criticized the aristocracy for engaging in luxurious consumption instead of saving and investing: on the other hand, no economic progress is possible as long as the peasant considers his poverty natural and does nothing to escape it. The peasant must be taught to strive for personal well-being (as distinct from luxury) in order to be properly motivated to engage in economic activities (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. II, p. 263). Supi≈ski’s social program is similar to his economic one. “Where the middle estate, due to historical circumstances, could not develop in towns … it must grow in the villages” (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. III, p. 223). The Polish middle class should grow from the mixture of small gentry and rich peasantry. (It should be noted that when he writes about farmers, he does not mention whether he means noblemen or peasants. This is probably deliberate.) Analogous ideas were often expressed by moderate conservatives who wanted to ensure that the nobility remained the leading social stratum even after capitalist reform. Not so Supi≈ski: his attachment to modernization and capitalist development was beyond suspicion. He did not try to rein in capitalist ideology in order to serve the class interests of the nobility—rather he tried to make liberal economic theory suitable for the realities of a backward country. He seriously attempted to create a Polish school of social economy. In advocating modern capitalist agriculture as the engine of economic development he cites the example of Denmark and refers to the American economist William Carey. There is a lot more to Supi≈ski’s ideas, however. Like every Polish ‘Westernizer’, he had to solve the important problem of the relations between national and universal values. From the liberal point of view the theoretical problem was easy; the ‘invisible hand,’ creating the com-

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mon good from individuals’ striving to realize their private interests, by the same token harmonizes the gain of every nation with the gain of humanity as a whole. This line of reasoning, firmly anchored in the Enlightenment tradition, corresponded with the Romantic faith in the brotherhood of peoples, best expressed in the slogan of the 1830–31 Polish uprising: “For your freedom and ours.” However, the advocacy of economic modernization created fears that specific national features may get lost under the pressure of globalization. Supi≈ski must have been a pessimist by inclination: he accepted optimistic liberal dogmas only in order to challenge them and to show their weaknesses. Thus, he was convinced that Poland should repeat the development of the more advanced nations of the West, and should not try to conserve backwardness in the guise of Polish national character; by “turning attention to appearances, not to the essence,” we may come to a situation in which “nationality becomes a ritual; rude peasant dialect is considered our maternal language; and wilderness … is treated as the cherished inheritance of our ancestors” (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. I, p. 128]. In accordance with this, Supi≈ski believed that it was not exploitation of the weaker nations and classes that had made the West rich, but universal progress. Elsewhere, however, he expressed almost contrary opinions. The “inborn race of living beings”—that is, universal competition—is among the most important laws of the physical world (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. I, p. 145). His methodological individualism (typical of liberal approaches to the social sciences) pushed him into the belief that what was true in individual life was true for society as a whole: nations, like individuals, can therefore be creditors or debtors. The debtor nation that does not work and save will be erased from the face of the earth; this fate had befallen the Poles in East Prussia and in parts of Pomerania, and it could befall them elsewhere (Supi≈ski, 1883, Vol. II, p. 155). What was more likely to be lost if not cared for properly: liberty or nationality?, asked Supi≈ski, only to answer that nationality was in greater danger than liberty: for we can deprive the people of their nationality by giving them liberty, whereas the opposite is not possible. He did not hesitate to quote one of the most radical Polish conservatives of the time in order to prove the necessity of retaining even the most obsolete national customs as the shelter of national identity. Reasoning of this kind, occasionally adorned with anti-Jewish or anti-German outbursts of varying intensity, would be perfectly understandable in the works of a traditionalist, horrified by the onset of modern industrial civilization. Here, however, they are set into a clearly liberal structure of thought, underpinned by faith in progress, rationalism, and the salutary results of economic development. Supi≈ski’s fears are inconsistent with his general attitude, but these outbursts of pessimism

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make him more interesting than most of his naively optimistic liberal contemporaries; somehow he anticipates the doubts that most liberals would come to grasp only in the changed atmosphere of the turn of the century.

7. In connection with the rationalist atmosphere that had evolved in Poland before 1863, we should not forget that the uprising of 1863–64 did represent a real breakthrough. Any vestige of autonomy was lost in Russian Poland, whereas the reconstruction of the Habsburg monarchy resulted in a considerable measure of autonomy being given to Galicia. Prussian Poland was subject to more and more open Germanization, starting in the 1870s with the Kulturkampf (which was an anti-Catholic measure in Germany as a whole, but in Prussian Poland assumed a clearly antiPolish form). The fear lest the Poles lose the ‘universal contest’ and find themselves ‘out of the game’ was growing stronger (and would soon come under the influence of Social Darwinism). A brilliant essay published in 1864 entitled ‘The Poles and the Indians’ conjured up the dark picture of Poles being physically and culturally wiped out by the partitioning powers in the same way as the North American Indians were being destroyed by the white settlers (Powidaj, 1988, pp.158–63). Many journalists repeated the same analogy, while the Czechs were often mentioned as a positive example, showing the possibilities to be exploited by ‘organic work’ (see above). The Polish liberals’ esteem for Czech achievements in the last three decades of the nineteenth century is a rare example of such sentiment in the thousand-year history of Polish– Czech relations. Thus, Polish liberal social thought oscillated between an ‘Indian’ nightmare and a ‘Czech’ utopia. Ironically, it was in Russian Poland, under the greatest pressure from the Russification which started in the late 1860s, that Polish liberal thought developed most impressively. The so-called ‘Warsaw positivists’— the generation born in the 1840s—took over the slogan ‘organic work’ and provided it with an absolutely new justification. It was not the romantic idealism of the 1840s, nor the common-sense empiricism of the 1850s and early 1860s, but self-conscious and radical positivism and rationalism that was proclaimed as the only modern and scientific social theory at the turn of the 1860s and 1870s. The young attacked with fury and passion; their tribune was the Weekly Review [PrzeglΩd Tygodniowy], and their great years were the early 1870s. Mill and Darwin— later also Herbert Spencer—were their highest authorities. They took from British liberalism the concept of a minimal state and joined it with the notion of organic work. The development of organic work in various fields of social life would make society itself an

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‘organic’ whole, that is, one that would be able to solve all problems by its own efforts, that would not waste anybody’s abilities, and in which every individual and every social class would fulfil its tasks, contributing to the welfare of the community as a whole and that of its component parts. Idealized visions of Britain—sometimes also of France and Germany—served as examples; the British aristocracy, taking part in philanthropic and other social activities, was contrasted with the Polish nobility, which was alleged to be egoistic and isolated from the lower classes. With such a perfect ‘organic’ society, the state would be unnecessary, and the question of Polish independence would lose its meaning. This anti-étatist attitude marks the specificity of the Warsaw positivists among the Polish and Central and Eastern European liberals, who either looked to the state for help in overcoming backwardness or (in the case of some gentry liberals) were only lukewarm modernizers. This conjunction of a radical zeal for modernization with an equally radical anti-étatism we find only among the Warsaw positivists. Needless to say, the same phrases meant different things on the banks of the Vistula and on those of the Thames. Positivists, both Western and Polish, claimed that they did not want to moralize, but only to describe; however, since social life as described by Spencer or Mill by no means matched the Polish reality, the texts of the Western authors intended as descriptive sociology (although obviously not without value judgments) were read as normative precepts. Using rationalist and scientific phraseology, the positivists did, in fact, preach, presenting the Polish audience with an idealized vision of the West. It should also be stressed that the renunciation of the state, considered as alien and inimical, was not exactly the same as the anti-étatism of Herbert Spencer, directed against the power of the state which was obviously “his own” (whatever that may mean). The positivists in Russian Poland did not have the slightest prospect of influencing the government; the state they encountered was their enemy, which sought increasingly to limit the sphere of legal action—not only political (which was virtually out of the question in any case), but also social, cultural, and economic. The great vision of organic work had few opportunities for realization in a country in which the establishment of any legal organization—be it philanthropic or educational—was forbidden. At the same time, the Polish liberals in Galicia hoped for the co-operation of the Austrian government in the task of industrialization. The liberals in Russian Poland would develop extremely étatist views after 1905, when the changed political situation seemed to offer them some chance of influencing state social and economic policies. Here is as good a proof as a historian can ever have that their anti-étatism was only tactical. Appeals to civic conscience, moral duty, and love of country (Poland could not be mentioned by name) were made for the sake of state eco-

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nomic, social, and cultural policies. Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, it was its lack of scope for action, and the severe police regime to which it was subject, that gave birth to the liberal ideology that was, of all the Central and Eastern European liberal movements of the age, the closest to the classical British laissez-faire example. The positivists’ attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church was similar to that of the government of the Duchy of Warsaw: they wanted the Church to be active in social life, serving as a means to diffuse modern attitudes and a progressive spirit. The prospects of this, however, were still more bleak than they had been sixty years earlier, as the positivists (contrary to their predecessors) did not hide their religious skepticism; moreover, not being in power, they had nothing to offer the Church for its collaboration. On the other hand, the Church was less prone to compromise than at any time previously or afterwards. The attempt at compromise should be noted, however, as it shows that the enmity between the Church and the liberals, although strong, was not absolute.

8. The last decades of the nineteenth century brought a stronger challenge to liberal attitudes than ever before. The antipositivist turn in European culture found the liberals unprepared. The irrationalist revival must have seemed to them a negation of the laws of historical progress. They believed that historical development steered an inevitable course from the rule of the emotions to the rule of reason, and now they saw their hopes disappointed. In Austrian Poland the masses were entering politics slowly, starting in the early 1890s (social democracy was established in 1892, the Peasant Party in 1895). Although conflicts abounded, the change was on the whole peaceful, in contrast to what happened in the Russian partition, the revolution of 1905 marking the violent advent of mass politics. This wave of violence meant death for the liberal movement in Russian Poland, whereas in Galicia it retained some influence in the western part of the province. It is worth stressing that at the turn of the century mass politics appeared roughly simultaneously in Europe as a whole, irrespective of the level of development of the given region. It was not only the masses which chose the new radical parties, however. Even worse from the liberal point of view was the disappointing behavior of the middle classes, always seen as the natural social base of liberalism. Now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Polish middle class, although weak and poor, at last came into being. In common with the middle classes of the other nationalities of Central and Eastern Europe, however, it turned strongly nationalist and did not join the liberal camp,

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instead becoming the most devoted participant in the national conflicts of the early twentieth century. But this was not the worst of it: although the liberals’ appeal was always confined to elite social groups, nevertheless they might have hoped to remain an elitist party for intellectuals even in an age of mass politics—as long as the intelligentsia remained faithful. But it did not, and this desertion was perhaps the most important feature of the crisis. “The new generation’s intellectual needs cannot be satisfied by collecting butterflies, their emotions by saving their pennies, their energy by joining a rowing club,” wrote a young nationalist as early as 1887 in a polemic intended to reduce ad absurdum the ideals of “philistine organic work” (Pop°awski, 1910, p. 13). The Positivists still defended “small ideals” and “little virtues” as the only real values and continued to see dangers only in neo-romantic language and ideology. The fixation with individual emotional and existential problems, so typical of the atmosphere of the neo-romantic movement, seemed to them both childish and cowardly: since the only serious problems were social questions, whoever sought to evade them was guilty of desertion. “When Prometheus cries ‘I suffer,’ we are moved with compassion,” wrote the patriarch of the Warsaw positivists, Aleksander ´ Swi¡tochowski (1849–1938), “but when the same words are uttered by the student of a gymnasium because his girlfriend has refused to dance ´ with him, our hearts do not miss a beat” (Swi¡tochowski, 1973, p. 546). It was perhaps their inability to embrace the new language of politics that made the liberals so unattractive to the intellectuals. It is a commonplace that in the early twentieth century modernism created a highly ‘aggressive’ jargon that for a few years ruled in the social sciences, history, and philosophy, as well as in journalism and political propaganda. The liberal press remained by and large untouched by it: although this makes it a good deal easier to read now, hundred years ago it must have looked hopelessly obsolete and unattractive. The liberals did not surrender without a struggle; they managed to create modern party structures in Galicia and (after 1905) in the Kingdom of Poland; they adopted (especially in Russian Poland) a radically interventionist economic program; they even put aside—shamefully— the very term ‘liberal,’ calling themselves ‘Progressive Democrats’ or ‘Radicals’ (in common with most of the parties coming from the liberal tradition all over the continent). The choice of new tactics was a difficult matter: the liberals were first of all put out by the emergence of the new radical nationalist movement. Up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the liberals considered themselves the natural guardians of the national idea. Nation, together with progress, freedom, and economic development, was one

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of the symbols of their sentiments, and national freedom was considered one of the basic progressive tenets. One of the standard reproaches made to conservatives concerned their cosmopolitan character. This symbiosis of liberal and national ideals was somewhat shaken by instances of national egoism during the revolution of 1848–49; the real turn, however—what may be called the transition from patriotism to nationalism, or, as Heinrich August Winkler calls it, “from the nationalism of the left to the nationalism of the right”—occurred only in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The Polish liberals were clearly confused by this evolution of European nationalism; they tried for a time to retain their status as natural bearers of the patriotic idea and to debate with the modern nationalists as to who the ‘real’ patriots were. They could not do this openly in Russian Poland before 1905, of course, but in Galicia the debate was very public, culminating in the 1903 dispute between the leader of the ‘old’ (that is, liberal) democrats, Tadeusz Romanowicz, and the leader of the ‘new’ Polish nationalism, Roman Dmowski. At the same time, another rival appeared on the opposite side. If the nationalists deprived the liberals of the ‘national’ element of their ideology, the social democrats called into doubt their ‘progessiveness.’ The liberal community throughout the nineteenth century entertained a pleasant self-image as the party of progress and humanity, its enemies being mostly among the conservatives, who, in turn, considered liberalism their most dangerous enemy. Suddenly, compared with the radical changes demanded by the social democrats, the liberal program started to look pale and halfhearted, indeed, almost conservative. The liberal reaction was similar to the one aroused by the nationalists: they tried to stress the social elements in their program in an attempt to defeat the socialists with their own weapons. Those potential liberal supporters who were not swayed by the nationalists or the socialists were absorbed by the so-called ‘independentist’ movement which was even more successful than the other two in mastering the fashionable phraseology. The ‘independentists’ attempted to revive the old romantic vision in accordance with which Polish independence was a matter of both freedom and humanity. This theory did have inconsistencies, related principally to the problem of the future Poland’s borders; nevertheless the independence movement attracted a large part of the young intelligentsia which espoused patriotic and democratic (even social democratic) ideals, while detesting the ideology of ‘national egoism’ preached by the Right. All these groups attracted educated young people, who a generation earlier would have joined the liberals. The latter could not change their image and they missed the new generation. This sealed their fate.

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9. Apart from the fact that the liberals were unable to stop the growth of their rivals, their attempts to adopt elements from the programs of the latter threatened their own liberal identity, with the risk that they would become a satellite either of social democracy (with a view to attracting fellow travelers among the intellectuals) or of the National Democracy of Roman Dmowski. Any attempts to outdo the National Democrats in national zeal were further handicapped by another fundamental problem of the epoch, the Jewish question. In this respect the attitude of the liberals was defined by their general outlook. If they considered the national idea the ally of progress and liberty, it was because their main enemy was (as already noted) what they called the spirit of ‘feudal exclusivity.’ The national idea seemed to them an excellent tool with which to bind together the separate castes, estates, and groups, and to mold them into a unitary civil society. The national idea in its liberal version was always inclusivist. Thus, the Jews were treated in the same way as peasants, clergy, aristocrats, and women: that is, as a group whose separate status was a sad effect of old prejudices and which should be integrated into the nation as soon as possible. As regards the Jewish question this meant that the Polish liberals—like liberals all over Europe—embraced the program of assimilation. They advocated it with great energy and optimism in the 1860s and 1870s, and they never renounced it completely, although it was increasingly called into question. The clearer it became that the hope of making Jews into Poles in a single generation was merely a dream, the greater the frequency with which anti-Jewish remarks could be found in the writings of the Polish liberals. Only the orthodox Jewish community was targeted by this criticism, however: the assimilated Jews were presented as a positive example. The ‘new’ nationalists turned this upside down, choosing as their chief enemy the assimilated Jews, allegedly much more dangerous than the orthodox because they hid their inalienable ‘Jewishness’ under the garb of Polish culture. One would suppose that the acceptance of such an ideology would be absolutely impossible for liberals, entailing as it does acceptance of the Jews as a separate ‘caste’ at the expense of the basic liberal attempt to create a unitary civil society. Strange as it may seem, part of the liberal camp, especially in the Kingdom of Poland, did come fairly close to the nationalist stance, giving birth to the idea of so-called ‘progressive antiSemitism.’ The mechanism was roughly as follows: dislike of the unassimilated was widened to assimilated persons who were not active enough in propagating the idea of assimilation among the orthodox. Since liberal expectations concerning Jewish assimilation were unrealistic, the reproaches soon encompassed most of the assimilated Jewry: thus the

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most important press organ of the assimilated Jewish–Polish intelligentsia, the weekly Izraelita, was often criticized by PrzeglΩd Tygodniowy. Although the program of both periodicals as regards assimilation was very much the same, Izraelita better understood the difficulties involved and therefore urged moderation and patience. In the growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism it was easy for some liberals to go one step further and conclude that the assimilated Jewry at large hindered the assimilation of the masses: it was not hard to find a reason for this in the alleged disloyalty of the assimilated, accused of only ostensibly accepting Polish culture while actually remaining alien. The growth of Zionism undoubtedly strengthened the liberals in this evolution (although the evolution itself started before the triumphs of Zionism), showing them that Jews who accepted European culture could still retain their Jewish consciousness—why not suppose that this is the case with every Jew who appeared to be ‘civilized’? Thus in the first part of the second decade of the twentieth century some representatives of the liberal camp took a position on the Jewish question almost identical to that of the National Democrats. The liberals never openly renounced the program of assimilation and never accepted racist dogmas; they always stressed that one can be a good Pole irrespective of religion or ethnic background. If they attacked the Jews, they stressed that they did it from the position of defenders of progress and humanity. Their antiJewish invectives make it very hard to distinguish them from the nationalists, however. (If there was a difference it was that the ‘progressive’ anti-Semites were at the same time anticlerical; one of their leaders, Andrzej Niemojewski, called the Jews the “fifth partitioner of Poland,” the first three, obviously, being Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and the fourth being the Roman Catholic Church.) It should not be overlooked that old anti-Jewish prejudices were present among many of the liberals and that they influenced their intellectual evolution in the direction described, appearing in the guise of a concern for social and economic progress. It is also worth noting that various attempts to link ‘progressive’ and anti-Semitic ideas were present in other countries too—for example, among the Austrian Germans (Weeks, 1995, pp. 49–68; Golczewski, 1981, pp. 90–118). With some measure of irony we may say that ‘progressive anti-Semitism’ was the most successful attempt to modernize liberal ideology in accordance with the mood prevailing in the early twentieth century. This dubious success did not suffice, however, and most of the liberals who embraced it were absorbed by National Democracy—this was the fate of S´wi¡tochowski in his old age. Those liberals who survived the turbulent era of the revolution of 1905–07 understood that their only chance was to distinguish themselves clearly from the socialists and the nationalists. They renounced anti-

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Semitism and extreme chauvinism while stressing their patriotism, and they adopted many social policies while retaining the belief that the economy cannot be directed by the state. In the western part of Galicia, especially in Cracow, they managed to retain some political power until the First World War; while in the Kingdom of Poland there were still a number of small liberal groups that had not been seduced by progressive anti-Semitism.

III. The main purpose of this sketch of Polish liberalism is to show that the evolution of liberal thought on Polish soil was complicated and crooked: not only was there no liberal party or clear-cut group that would ensure a sort of personal and organizational continuity throughout the period, but there was no conscious intellectual continuity either. Very rarely have Polish liberals seen themselves as members of a clear-cut tradition; usually they have borrowed immediately from the West without much thought for their Polish predecessors. However, the continuity of Polish liberal thought cannot be denied; even if the actors themselves know nothing about it, a historian can draw a line starting with the étatist ‘Jacobin’ proto-liberals from the Napoleonic period and reaching the Progressive Democrats one hundred years later (and even further). In drawing this line we should beware of falling into the hopeless debates often conducted by Polish historians concerning whether a given person could be described as a liberal, a democrat, a conservative, or a socialist. Only a few persons or groups in nineteenth-century Poland could be more or less easily ascribed to the liberal stream. It is more fruitful to choose liberal thought, not liberal thinkers, as the object of our investigation. To take an example, Cieszkowski belongs as much to the Christian–Social tradition as to the liberal one, whereas the Progressive Democrats from the early twentieth century mix socialist and liberal themes in their ideology in almost equal proportions. Nevertheless, some aspects of their ideas undoubtedly belong to the liberal tradition and can be used to characterize the continuous evolution of Polish liberal thought. There is nothing wrong in attributing the same thinker to two or even more currents of thought: a historian attempting to reconstruct the history of Polish conservatism or socialism would have to make reference to many of the thinkers included here under the liberal tradition, putting their ideas into a different context. If we consider Polish liberalism from this standpoint—as a current of thought rather than a sequence of people who considered themselves liberals—we can try to answer the question raised in the title of this chapter. The ‘classical’ attitude to the history of Polish liberalism was

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guided by an implicit (and sometimes explicit) reasoning, which went roughly as follows: the social stratum best suited to embrace liberal ideas is the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie in Poland was weak; ergo, liberalism in Poland was weak. The major premise in this reasoning is not true. Sometimes it happened that the bourgeoisie supported liberalism, but this was by no means the rule. Indeed, an American student of nineteenth-century liberalism claimed recently that the belief in any intimate connection between liberal and bourgeois values forms an important barrier to understanding the history of liberal thought (Kahan, 1992). Apart from the bourgeoisie there seem to have been at least two social strata in nineteenth-century Europe that could serve as bearers of liberal ideology: the nobility and the intelligentsia. The production of new ideas was not the only role of the intelligentsia; throughout the nineteenth century its main task as regards the spreading of ideas was that of ‘receiver and transmitter.’ Obviously, in the process of transmission ideas became adapted to local conditions— again, none but the intelligentsia was able to perform this task. Although this applies to all ideologies, liberalism was particularly attractive to intellectuals. In places like Poland it offered hope that the vicious circle of backwardness might be broken and the country’s level of development eventually raised to that of the more advanced countries of the West. Naturally, backwardness was harmful to most (if not all) of the population, but the intelligentsia was hit hardest as the stratum most influenced by the demonstration effect. The nobility’s concern with liberalism was somewhat different. The liberal programs took many of their ideas and phraseology from the estates’ opposition to absolutism; as a result, the nobility cherished the hope that the liberals would now help them to achieve victory over their hereditary foe, the absolute monarchy. Only too late did it turn out that the new liberal governments were no less centralized than the old absolutist regimes—a realization upon which noble liberals became conservatives. To put it crudely: the intelligentsia accepted the aims of liberalism—creating a civil society and a capitalist economy, maximizing well-being and liberty—but were often tempted to use more radical means, while the nobility accepted some of the means and slogans (especially those concerning a cheap and decentralized state), but supported them with its own aims in view, trying to marry moderate modernization with elements of the old system. Although Poland had no bourgeoisie ready to embrace liberal ideas, there was both a strong nobility and a strong intelligentsia, making untenable the claim that liberalism in Poland had no significant social base. The syllogism quoted earlier may perhaps be replaced with another: Polish intellectual life in the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by intellectual developments in the West; liberalism was among the

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most important ideologies in nineteenth-century Western Europe; ergo, liberalism was among the most important intellectual currents in Poland as well. This statement may be helpful in explaining both the relative strength and the relative weakness of Polish liberalism. It did have its period of triumph, starting with the ‘Springtime of the Nations’ in 1848—or perhaps a little earlier—and ending some forty years later, in the 1880s. Quotations abound from the 1840s to show that liberal ideas and the capitalist economy were slowly conquering the world. The failure of the 1848–49 revolution did not crush this belief, and it was repeated even by the enemies of liberalism. Conservative opinions were no less prevalent during this period than earlier or later, the socialists grew stronger as the years passed, but until the early 1880s all anti-liberal voices were more or less on the defensive: while not doubting their ultimate victory, they nevertheless saw their age as one of liberal dominance. In this sense we may talk about the strength of liberalism: it did not destroy its enemies, perhaps it hardly even weakened them, but it did succeed in making them believe for a time that they were living in a liberal epoch. This attitude began to change in the early 1880s: the conservatives, nationalists, and socialists gained in self-confidence, beginning to see themselves as the forces of the future and to consider liberalism as obsolete. At least some of the liberals adopted this view in the early twentieth century, so that the situation immediately before 1914 was the opposite of what it had been two generations earlier. As a strong, at times perhaps even the strongest current of Polish political thought in the nineteenth century, liberalism did play a political role. But even during its periods of relative strength it did not succeed in transforming society. This was not due to the presence of the partitioning powers, although the authoritarian regimes did of course hinder the development of liberal politics; more important was the fact that liberalism never permeated the language and style of public life in Poland. Hayek spoke of liberalism as a ‘framework’—not a political ideology, but a set of preconditions which allows a modern pluralist society to function and permits the citizens to profess more or less any ideology they wish. Polish liberalism never became such a ‘framework,’ however: it never created a liberal—in the sense of tolerant and pluralist— atmosphere of public debate. In this sense it was weak, while all over Europe, at one time or another, it dominated the intellectual arena. Economic backwardness did not hinder this success. By way of conclusion, it would be worth attempting to synthesize into a single picture all that we have said about nineteenth-century Polish liberals. At the beginning of this chapter I deliberately avoided the strategy of enumerating a number of features common to liberalism in general as a yardstick against which individuals and groups might then be

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measured. Instead, I tried to show how what common sense might call ‘liberalism’ was transformed as a result of the prevailing economic, political, social, and intellectual conditions. Any attempt to describe Polish liberalism in terms of general features, however, should probably take into account three elements in particular: (i) rationalism, (ii) attempts at modernization, and (iii) what Jerzy Szacki calls the “language of the rights of the individual” (Szacki, 1995, p. 31). Rationalism and attempts at modernization have already been mentioned more than once. When talking about Polish liberalism it is often tempting to equate liberals with modernizers, but the truth is more complicated. Modernizing tendencies are also present in social democratic doctrines and in moderate conservative thought; on the other hand, at least some representatives of gentry liberalism—the Callisians included—were not much interested in the problems of modernization, despite being genuine liberals. The problem of the ‘language of individual rights’ is even more complicated. Methodological individualism is surely a theoretical premise of Polish liberal thought; however, the practical solutions proposed for many of the social and political problems of the day were as a rule collectivist. The great problem of whether the common interest should have priority over the individual one was never solved. Supinski addressed this problem a few times but—as noted earlier—reached no satisfactory conclusion. Very few people stated openly— as did the lawyer and essayist Karol Dunin, one of the members of the Warsaw Positivist movement—that individual freedoms are to be defended only because they are means to safeguard the well-being of society as a whole. Dunin, however, toned down his conviction by claiming that the growth of individualism is the objective law of progress (he read this in Spencer) (Dunin, 1879, p. 25, p. 113; 1882, p. 81). Thus, the problem was avoided by accepting the axiom that individual and universal interests are somehow linked. Therefore, the Polish liberals may have retained their ‘collectivism’ in practical matters without having a bad conscience about betraying their individualism. This ‘individualist collectivism’ was one of the most important features of Polish liberal thought. But we can make a concise characterization of nineteenth-century Polish liberal thought without trying to analyze the three general features in detail. Suffice it to say that in nineteenth-century Polish intellectual life there was a clearly discernible body of opinions. There were people who believed in reason, progress, and humanity; they saw the backwardness of their country and were ready to allow much state intervention in order to foster economic and cultural development. At the same time, the state should refrain from restricting the spontaneous activities of society, directing its efforts instead towards performing those tasks that society is as yet unable to undertake by itself. The development of the whole universe of organizations, unions, co-opera-

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tives, and so on—what was then called ‘organic work’—was considered the best means of creating a modern civil society. Among these activities education was considered the most important. In a far from chauvinistic spirit, liberals considered the development of the modern Polish nation an important task: in their view, the national idea was an instrument of democratizing and bringing greater equality to society. In spite of the encouragement given to the secularization of public life, the Roman Catholic Church was not considered an enemy, but rather a possible ally in the task of modernization. Why then can we not call this set of ideas Polish liberalism? The originality of the ideas discussed above, as measured against the highest achievements of Western thought, may not be startling. What is important, however, is that the very task of rethinking the Western liberal tradition and accommodating it to Polish conditions was undertaken; important questions were raised concerning the possibility of realizing liberal ideals, social forces that may help or hinder them, and modifications that the ideals themselves should undergo. If they were not answered satisfactorily, at least they were subjected to lively and interesting debate. Wherever the political situation permitted (in the Kingdom of Poland before 1830, in Austrian Poland after 1867, or at times in Prussian Poland) the liberals did much good in the field of ‘organic work.’ The liberal tradition, often neglected in the popular visions of Polish history was at least as important a factor in shaping public attitudes and opinions as the tradition of independence uprisings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aleksandrowska, El¿bieta, ed. 1976. The Monitor 1765–85. Wybór [Monitor 1765–85. A Selection]. Wroc°aw: Ossolineum. Barszczewska-Krupa, Alina, ed. 1989. Rajmund Rembieli≈ski. Jego czasy i jego wspó°czesni [R. R. His times and his contemporaries]. Warsaw: Pa’nstw. Wydawn. Nauk. Bobbio, Norberto. 1993. Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press. Cieszkowski, August. 1844. De la Paire et de l’Aristocratie moderne. Paris: Libraire d’Amyot. Dunin, Karol. 1879. Prawo w°asno√ci [Property rights]. Warsaw. ———. 1882. ‘Indywidualizm w ¿yciu spo°ecznym’ [Individualism in social life], in Ognisko. KsiΩ¿ka zbiorowa wydana dla uczczenia 25-letniej pracy T. T. Jeza.Warsaw. Golczewski, Frank. 1981. Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Jedlicki, Jerzy. 1997. ‘Inteligencja,’ in S°ownik literatury polskiej XIX w., ed. J. Bachorz and A. Kowalczykowa. 2nd ed. Wroc°aw: Ossolineum.

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Kahan, Alan S. 1992. Aristocratic Liberalism. The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kizwalter, T., and J. Skowronek. 1988. Droga do niepodleg°o√ci czy program defensywny? Praca organiczna—programy i motywy [The road to independence or a defensive program? Organic work—programs and themes]. Warsaw: Pax. [Ko°°Ωtaj, H.] 1808. Uwagi nad teraπniejszym po°o¿eniem tej cz¡√ci ziem polskich, które od pokoju tyl¿yckiego zacz¡to zwa∆ Ksi¡stwem Warszawskim [Remarks on the present position of that part of the Polish lands that after the Peace of Tilsit was called the Duchy of Warsaw]. Warsaw. n. a. 1831. ‘Mlody i stary liberalizm,’ Polak Sumienny 43 and 44. n. a. 1836. ‘O melioracjach w rolnictwie’ [On improvements in agriculture], Przewodnik Rolniczo-Przemys°owy 15. n. a. 1843. ‘O prawach w°o√cian w Galicji’ [On the rights of peasants in Galicia], Biblioteka Warszawska (October). Poplawski, Jan Ludwik. 1910. Pisma polityczne [Political Writings]. Vol. 1. Warsaw. Porter, Brian. 2000. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potocki, S. K. 1816. Pochwa°y, Mowy, Rozprawy [Laudations, Speeches, Treatises], Vol. 2. Warsaw. Powidaj, Ludwik. 1988 [1864]. ‘Polacy i Indianie,’ Dziennik Literacki 53 (1864), reprinted in Kizwalter and Skowronek, 158–63. Rapaczynski, Andrzej. 1987. Nature and Politics. Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press. Rzewuski, Seweryn. n. d. O sukcesji tronu w Polszcze rzecz krotka [Short treatise on the hereditary monarchy in Poland]. n. p. Staszic, Stanis°aw. 1926. Przestrogi dla Polski [Admonitions to Poland], ed. S. Czarnowski. Cracow. Supinski, Józef, 1883. Dzie°a [Works]. Warsaw. 2nd ed. Vol. I, My√l ogólna fizjologii wszech√wiata [General idea of universal physiology]; Vols. II and III, Szko°a polska gospodarstwa spo°ecznego [Polish school of social economy], Parts 1 and 2. ´ Swi¡tochowski, A. 1973. Wybor pism krytycznoliterackich [Selected literary criticism], ed. M. Brykalska and S. Sandler. Warsaw. Szacki, Jerzy. 1995. Liberalism after Communism. Budapest: Central European University Press. Weeks, Theodore R. 1995. ‘Polish “Progressive Antisemitism” 1905–1914,’ East European Jewish Affairs 25. W¡grzecki, Stanis°aw. 1818. Dzieje o znaczeniu w°adzy duchownej obok √wieckiej w Polsce [History of the relations between ecclesiastical and secular power in Poland]. Warsaw. ZajΩczkowski, Andrzej. 1967. Hauptelemente der Adelkultur in Polen. Ideologie und gesellschaftliche Struktur. Marburg/Lahn: Johann Gottlieb Herder Institut.

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FURTHER READING Apart from the works mentioned in the bibliography I would like especially to recommend a book by Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe. Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). This book, covering the period from the Enlightenment to the 1890s and dealing with the Polish version of the debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers, was my guide through the realm of nineteenth-century Polish liberalism and my debt to it is immense. Andrzej Walicki provides a short introduction to nineteenth-century Polish intellectual history in his Poland between East and West. The Controversies over Self-Definition and Modernization in Partitioned Poland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1994), while his Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) is an excellent analysis of Polish Romantic thought, showing that its ideas were often deep and demand serious reflection, even if the language of Messianic philosophy was often pretentious and unclear. Stanislaus Blejwas’ Realism in Polish Politics. Warsaw Positivism and National Survival in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) introduces the reader to Polish positivism. Robert Blobaum’s Rewolucja. Russian Poland 1904–1907 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) gives a vivid picture of politics in Russian Poland during and after the 1905 Revolution, with much attention given to liberal groups. Liberale Traditionen in Polen (Warsaw: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 1994) is a collection of German-language essays on various aspects of the history of Polish liberalism, and the first attempt to map its history up to the Second World War. The reader should also bear in mind the existence of two useful English-language anthologies: For Your Freedom and Ours. The Polish Democratic Spirit through the Centuries, edited by Manfred Kridl, Jozef Wittlin, and Wladyslaw Malinowski (New York: F. Ungar, 1943; 2nd ed., New York, 1981, ed. K. Olszer) brings together some important pieces of Polish liberal journalism, while Stranger in Our Midst: Images of the Jew in Polish Literature, compiled by Harold Segel (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1996), offers specimens of Polish literary works showing attitudes towards the Jewish question. The present essay is based on my Polish-language book Polska my√l liberalna do 1918 r. [Polish liberal thought up to 1918] (Warsaw and Cracow, 1998), which discusses in detail the problems introduced here. The book is available in the English version too, as Polish Liberal Thought before 1918, Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2004.

Czech Liberalism, 1848–1918 OTTO URBAN

I. In my analysis of the content and historical importance of nineteenthcentury Czech liberalism, I attempt to place the latter firmly in a tradition which can be considered one of the most influential ideologies of the last few centuries. I shall interpret the economic, social, political, and intellectual-historical issues separately, step by step. Therefore they will at times be in conflict with the chronology of events. Liberalism was an ‘open’ philosophy that, even in England, its birthplace, was at no time a complete system of ideas with a well-defined and determinate content. In this sense it would be more proper to talk of ‘liberalisms.’ (Indeed, even individual economic, political, and cultural types of liberalism had their various versions and alternatives with different interpretations and connotations in particular countries and during particular periods.) The current national context always had a great impact on the concrete realization of liberal ideas.

1. After almost half a millennium of the independent Czech Kingdom, as a consequence of the battle of Weissenberg (White Mountain) in 1620, the Czechs lost their autonomy and Bohemia became just another province of the Habsburg Empire with German as the principal language. The modernization of Czech society was a singular and inevitable process. Nineteenth-century Czech society had a very loose and indirect relationship to its own political and national traditions: as a result of earlier developments, it was ‘unfinished’ in terms of social stratification, having an inchoate ruling class and a weak middle class. The leaders of the Czech bourgeois intelligentsia understood the wishes and ambitions of the Czech people, but were also aware of social realities; they knew how weak and immature the structure and organization of their society was, and they had to deal with an underlying lack of social comprehension and recognition. It is obvious that societal modernization, having ethnic and cultural identity already, was a completely different story: there was no need cre-

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ating this identity where the ‘birth’ of bourgeois society coincided with the ‘re-birth’ of the nation. The modernization of Czech society was characterized by an intertwining of social development and national revival which, as elsewhere, was a robust and inexorable process: general liberal postulates were more or less inseparable from national demands, and throughout the nineteenth century all forms of Czech liberalism were ‘nationalistic’ to some degree. ‘Cosmopolitan liberalism,’ which leaves national feelings, identity, and consciousness out of account, was unknown in the Czech national context.

2. From the very beginning, from the late eighteenth century, Czech modernization was a matter of building up the Czech nation, saving it from the influences of Germanization. The Czech lands had been among the most developed socio-economic territories of the Habsburg Monarchy since the eighteenth century. Their importance increased during the nineteenth-century industrialization. Economic development was far from smooth, however. During the first half of the nineteenth century it amounted more to a series of renewed attempts—replete with numerous set-backs—than a clear-cut advance. Although in the Czech part of the Habsburg empire there were more cities and towns than elsewhere, and the proportion of the urban population was relatively high, the self-assured, financially stable, and enterprising urban tiers état was almost entirely absent. Industrialization was concentrated more in the countryside than in the towns. With the exception of Prague and a handful of spa towns, Czech urban settlements preserved their small-town character for a long time: the architectural, social, and cultural landscape of the cities, especially the suburbs, did not differ much from that of the villages. Only from the mid-nineteenth century were all the technical, economic, and legal conditions for a new type of industrial development and enterprise established. The peoples of the cities and the suburbs lived through a rapid progress, becoming the center of industrialization, although the provincial areas did not lose their importance: in the central parts of Bohemia, as well as in the west and north, and in the central and northern parts of Moravia, huge industrial areas took shape, with highly concentrated populations. This was the period in which the first generation of modern, selfconscious bourgeois appeared on the stage of Czech politics. As in other countries, the new Czech bourgeoisie was not the product of the transformation of the patricians, merchants and artisans. It was a new social group which was formed from practically all social strata, though to differing degrees. In the new bourgeois society, which was still relatively

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open, flexible, and accessible, social mobility was much more dynamic than in any earlier society. It is true that, as a result of the economic, social, and political changes taking place in the 1880s, the social structure had become ‘saturated’ and bourgeois society more rigid and closed. Nevertheless, the basic structure of the bourgeoisie remained intact. Since the socio-economic genesis of the modern Czech bourgeoisie has somehow evaded the attention of Czech historiography and sociology, those wishing to discuss the topic have to base their arguments on general tendencies and hypotheses. Nevertheless, it is obvious that in Bohemia the first two-three generations of the Czech bourgeoisie had a petty bourgeois character. Industrialization in Bohemia was based on large numbers of small- and medium-sized producers. Only at the turn of the century did large-scale industrialists and enterprises dominate it.

3. Bohemia, where almost two-thirds of the whole Czech population resided, was an ideal place in which to speculate on how to use—or rather to ‘exploit’—natural resources more efficiently. In the Habsburg Empire industrialization had been imported from Germany, or came through the mediation of the German territories. The Czech language lost its earlier cultural, scientific, and administrative functions and was eventually reduced to nothing more than the ordinary people’s vernacular. If a simple Czech craftsman wanted to take part in new forms of industrial production, he had to do it in German. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that the Czech language finally had a basic vocabulary for the phenomena of modern scientific and technological development. Several more decades were needed before this terminology reached the wider public and became part of the vernacular. In nineteenth-century Bohemia, it was almost impossible to tell what was Czech and what was German. Hundreds of smaller and larger entrepreneurs lived with a dual nationality in a bilingual context and lived essentially on the cultural periphery of their Czech society. This ‘third nationality,’ which had representatives in all social strata—especially the working class—played an important part in the social and economic life of the Czech provinces. During the nineteenth century, this ‘unnational’ stratum served as a basis for the development of the ethnic Czech and German societies. Due to the facts mentioned above, German capital had a significant advantage over its Czech counterpart for a long time. This gap began to diminish only in the 1860s, when Czech entrepreneurs managed to obtain a firmer foothold in the new productive spheres and to expand their economic activities. It was only at the turn of the century that, as a result of a positive program of expansion, large-scale Czech investment was

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able, more or less, to counterbalance German capital. If we look at the data, we can see that in this period the structure and dynamics of the German and the Czech societies were similar.

4. Liberalism, in general, grew out of the traditions of the Enlightenment: liberalism politically ‘processed’ and elaborated the ideas of the Enlightenment. Within the Habsburg Monarchy enlightened absolutism challenged backwardness. The comprehensive reforms introduced by Maria Theresa and especially Joseph II were serious attempts to transform the obsolete social and political structures of the Monarchy. These reforms and enlightened reform principles always came from above as ‘gifts’ and were based exclusively on the enlightened monarch’s and his advisers’ goodwills. In the Habsburg Monarchy, the vehicle of enlightened absolutism was not the middle class but the bureaucracy. It is true, particularly at the lower and middle levels of administration, that the bureaucracy had mainly bourgeois origins, but it developed its own identity as an independent ‘estate’ (stand). It was for this reason that the reforms were greeted with suspicion and, occasionally, with open hatred and rejection in most of urban Bohemia. State intervention became extremely strong, and with a single blow the state managed to sweep away the traditional limits of local self-government and of private life. No wonder local communities felt frustrated, vulnerable, and manipulated. In Bohemia, Enlightenment, an expression of initiatives from ‘below,’ did not exist as an alternative force. Like most places in Central Europe, in Czech cities there were lonely ‘enlightened thinkers’ who occasionally managed to overcome the difficulties they struggled with in order to meet similar ones. Sometimes they were able to form small groups, small ‘enlightened islands’ in the threatening alien urban environment. Nevertheless, enlightenment as such practically did not exist in Bohemia. These lonely thinkers never had enough strength to influence society at large. Enlightenment could never become the ideology and source of identity of the developing third estate. Joseph II’s attempt to create a rationally organized society led by educated and competent experts remained an abortive experiment. The French Revolution was a radical revision of the basic conditions and characteristics of political power. As a result, the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of society was also completely revised. Absolutism remained intact during the Revolution and, in many respects, became even stronger. In the meantime, however, it completely lost its progressive character. After the Napoleonic period, enlightened absolutism deteriorated into a highly centralized authoritarian regime à la Metternich. Every sponta-

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neous activity, initiated by the people, became increasingly difficult to pursue. The Josephinist raison d’étre had been replaced by the Metternichian one. Metternich and his staff aimed at turning back the social and political clock in the countries of the Monarchy, not only to where it had stood before the Revolution, but also to where they believed it to have stood before the Enlightenment. His autocratic mind realized that reforms, not only revolutions, could be dangerous. He knew that reforms might challenge and intrude into the realm of an unquestionable, eternal social order, in the same way as revolutions. His ideology definitively rejected all kinds of liberalism and tried to counter-balance it by means of a kind of Biedermeier interpretation of Romanticism. But this debate was more than theoretical. The state had enough power to take severe practical steps against liberalism. Liberalism was persecuted in all its forms: it was banned from universities and scientific societies, and strictly censored in the press. It was no accident that so many romantic theories of historiography were promulgated in the first decade of the nineteenth century, idealizing the Middle Ages, particularly their perfect social and legal order and moral values.

5. The Czech bourgeois intelligentsia developed their national emancipation program in the first few decades of the nineteenth century under very unfavorable cultural circumstances. It is somehow natural that, as a result of these circumstances and the limited possibilities of the time, the original program was quite vague and hesitant. The basic postulates of Czech liberalism were determined in the 1810s by teachers and priests, clerks and members of the literati, under the leadership of a linguist, Jozef Jungmann. The main point of the program was to revive, develop, and improve the Czech language so that it could preserve its status as a cultured and sophisticated European language adequate for the needs of science and literature, and fulfil its function as a means of communication in everyday life. Although this national emancipation program, especially in the works of its leading figure, Jungmann, was born under the strong influence of the Enlightenment and the liberal ideas of the time, it was not even a liberal—still less a political—program. In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, programs of Czech national emancipation originated from three sources. The most important was the Czech ethnic community. There were about four or five million people of Czech origin under the Monarchy, which constituted a substantial social group and a strong cultural and linguistic entity. Czech folklore, popular poetry, and folk music never disappeared; Czech popular written culture always found an audience among the masses; many popular works were published to educate and inform the common peo-

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ple. This living ethnic culture was to serve as a basis for a modern Czech society. The fact that nineteenth-century Czech society did not have a well-organized cultural life or its own state, and, as such, could not pursue its own national politics, might have given the impression that this society did not exist at all. This superficial approach often led to misunderstandings, and seemed to justify a deliberately false political thesis— widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth century—according to which the Czechs were an ‘artificial nation.’ In fact, the Czech ethnic community did exist and did not need to be created by artificial means. What it needed was to be given a chance to regenerate itself and to develop under more favorable circumstances. The second crucial source of programs of national emancipation was national consciousness. The task laid out to achieve this goal was to revive national feelings and boost national identity, first in the intelligentsia and later in other social groups. The whole period was often interpreted as the age of ‘vacuum’ or ‘stalemate,’ referring to the transitional character of the era. Many contemporaries considered their time as a transition between the glorious past and, hopefully, a similarly glorious future, whose coming they awaited with impatience. This approach was not surprising, if we consider the typically romantic interpretation of the nation, according to which it was a moral and legal entity, and entirely ahistorical. Most of the thinkers of the time were engaged in discovering the treasures of the past. They falsified and idealized this ‘perfect’— or rather ‘perfected’—past to set an example to the present generation. They treated the past as a strong support for the future, a source of knowledge from which to draw lessons. The third source of national emancipation emanated from the existence of a wider Slav community. The Czech bourgeoisie often referred to it when they looked to the future with optimism. This approach seems to have developed in order to compensate for the smallness and isolation of the Czech community, and was extremely popular, especially from the 1820s on. This idea of a common Slav identity appeared in numerous ideologies, with widely different interpretations and connotations, ranging from a vague, more or less approximate cultural relationship, to Pan-Slavism or the pseudo-political idea of Pan-Russism. Since, at that time, the Habsburg Monarchy and Tsarist Russia were ready to cooperate at the state level, this cultural Pan-Slavism was officially tolerated and able to develop for a while without significant restrictions. It is true that, on the one hand, it boosted the identity of the Czech bourgeoisie, but, on the other hand, it had a retarding effect on the development of modern Czech society. In its restrictive interpretation, PanSlavism somehow blocked the path of development of an independent Czech identity. It slowed down the process of recognizing the real polit-

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ical situation and elaborating an authentic Czech program of national emancipation. The Czech bourgeoisie—and gradually Czech society as a whole— were aware of the fact that the Kingdom of Bohemia or the “Bohemian Crownlands” (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) were a real historical–political entity. Under the strong centralizing policy of the Habsburg Monarchy, however, local patriotism could not develop. The latter could manifest itself only in totally innocent, apolitical forms and as simple academic material, popularizing some elements of Czech culture. The attitude of the Austro-German bourgeoisie was another restrictive factor in the development of a Czech identity. Most representatives of the German bourgeois intelligentsia, although they accepted the fact that the Bohemian Crownlands had certain special characteristics, regarded them as the provinces of a united Austrian Empire. The historical and political features of the Czech provinces were simple historical facts for them. They considered them as part of the past, which after the Weissenberg (White Mountain) period was irrelevant. Before 1848 it was natural that the program of Czech national emancipation could be formulated only in linguistic, literary, and cultural terms. The pre-Revolutionary system could not do anything against these forms of national activity, since the national communities, as historical–ethnic entities, belonged to the past, to the Old World that the existing political regime wished to found itself upon. The nourishing of the national values of Czech culture seemed to be a moderate, almost conservative program, which did not contradict the political goals of the regime. Josephinism, as we have seen before, was a centralized, enlightened absolutistic attempt to transform the lives of the Habsburg Empire’s people, including their mentalities, loyalties, beliefs, and habits, ‘from above.’ The national emancipation tendencies, in their original, apolitical form, intended to do the opposite. This was when the bourgeoisie began to ‘awaken’ and to become increasingly active. Finally, they managed to gain some ground in public life, which, ironically, might have been the reason—probably a subconscious one—for their apolitical attitude. This was the time when the systematic development of a Czech national culture began. Various national institutions were built, one after another; national newspapers and periodicals were launched, and numerous formal and informal societies were established. All this, of course, had a beneficial effect on the growth of a Czech culture and introduced new customs and norms into the Czech national environment, which anticipated the attitudes and customs of later political movements and parties. Long before the Czech bourgeoisie had a real opportunity to take part in politics, the organizational framework was ready. The whole system of organizational relationships, the sophisticated structure of sub-

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ordination and division of labor, the compulsory discipline within parties, the mandatory character of program-like party decisions, and so on, were basically all created by the apolitical generation of patriots. All these structures, typical of later political parties, originated here, despite the fact that their ambitions never left the field of language and literature. Nevertheless, the romantic idealization of the Czech ethnic community and national history, and of Pan-Slavism, with its naive ideas, could not serve long as a natural basis for the development of an authentic Czech program of emancipation. In the 1840s, when a new, liberal generation of patriots emerged in Czech society, the original premises of the national program underwent a comprehensive revision. In contrast with the old, romantic generation of patriots, this new, educated, more rational, and practical-minded generation of liberals highly criticized the attitude of its predecessors. The new generation was represented by some strong, characteristic figures with a well-defined political profile. Two of these well-known personalities were Franti≥ek Ladislav Rieger, a lawyer, and Karel Havlí∑ek, a journalist. The old generation, apart from a few exceptions who were ready to keep pace with the times, gradually lost importance. One of these rare exceptions was Franti≥ek Palack§, a famous historian. As far as the increasingly liberal circumstances made it possible, the new generation endeavored to pursue a liberal version of the national emancipation program even before 1848. They demanded that the contemporary life and circumstances of the Czech nation and people be analyzed in a clear, rational way, based on facts, not dreams. They condemned and rejected the outdated approach centered on philology and historiography, and instead promoted productive and efficient activities in all fields of human endeavor. When Havlí∑ek rejected all forms of Pan-Slavism, including its cultural manifestations, his demonstrative gesture symbolized a real turning point. He emphasized the unique and special characteristics of Czech national identity and the specific social-political position of the Czechs in Central Europe. At the same time, he did not deny that Austro-Slavism, a potential Slav cooperation within the Habsburg Monarchy, would always be possible. The events of 1848 demonstrated the rightness of this conviction. The struggle that took place in the 1840s between the old, politically naive, and often very conservative patriots, who had trouble distinguishing themselves clearly from other social groups, and the new ideologists, who represented an authentic liberal philosophy, was a landmark in the history of the Czech liberals. Without this struggle it would have been impossible for the Czech bourgeoisie to represent a European viewpoint during the great social crisis of 1848–49. As a result of these changes the Czech national emancipation program became more political and practical. In the new program the purely national (linguistic and literary) demands were linked to new, liberal postulates, including

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claims for radical changes in the basic social, political, and governmental structures; the principles of national emancipation were balanced by the principles of general human and civil emancipation. The new liberals demanded not only freedom for the Czech nation, but for the French Revolutionary triad of freedom, equality, and fraternity to determine relationships within the nation and among all nations.

II. The avant-garde of the Czech bourgeois intelligentsia occasionally adopted liberal ideas from original French or English sources, but most of the time they used indirect German sources. With these ideas they also adopted the Western European interpretation of civil and human rights. The adaptation of the main liberal ideas to the Czech environment was a long and differentiated process. The main trend insisted on the old, classical interpretation of liberal ideas. At the same time, there emerged another, weaker but more active and radical trend, which endeavored to generalize liberal demands and to establish them with a broader foundation. The contradictions between the classical, moderate version of liberalism and the radical, liberal democratic trend were crystallized even before 1848. When the liberals, for example—under the leadership of F. Palack§, K. Havlí∑ek, and F. Rieger—fought for the demands of the ‘third estate,’ they meant the demands of the bourgeoisie and the country estates. The Radicals, led by Karel Sabina, a writer, and Karel Sladkovsk§, a lawyer, interpreted the notion of the ‘third estate’ much more widely to include the less privileged classes. Another important difference was that the Radicals put more emphasis on social issues.

1. As far as civil and human rights and bourgeois liberties were concerned, there was no significant dissension between the two groups. They all agreed with the principles of the American and French Revolutions, which demanded formally and generally equal rights for everybody, and sought guarantees for the assertion of individual human rights. Both groups unanimously incorporated these rights into their general programs without any significant modification. Nevertheless, this unanimity did not extend to political rights. Classical liberalism insisted on legal equality, but did not insist on political equality. According to classical liberal ideas, legislative, executive, and judicial powers were to be restricted to those with the ‘proper’ financial and educational background. According to this modern concept of ‘political nation,’ the nation was coterminous with a number of politically privileged social groups, which stood above the common people, who, although enjoying

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some political freedom, were excluded from public life. The radical democratic trend in liberalism categorically rejected this view. They demanded equal opportunities for all to enter public service and intended to abolish all illiberal restrictions in society. If we examine the 1848–49 parliamentary debates of the Constituent Assemblies in Vienna and Krom±rˇ íπ (Kremsier), we get a more or less accurate picture of contemporary Czech liberal and democratic thought. The Czech liberals played a rather contradictory but crucial role at these conventions, especially in relation to the issues of civil and human rights. Their leader, F. L. Rieger, who was one of the most active members of the Constitutional Committee, drafted the proposals on basic human rights, basing them on the constitutions of a number of Western states. Despite dissonant voices from within the Constituent Assembly and the Parliamentary center, Rieger, backed by other liberals, insisted on proposing the radical version of the constitutional draft. He was opposed to serfdom or any other form of personal dependency and wanted to eliminate the noble classes and all their privileges. He demanded a comprehensive liberal reform of the law and the abolition of capital punishment. He claimed that to achieve formal universal equality it was necessary to start by assuring fundamental individual human rights to everybody, and thought that the elaboration of guarantees of individual freedom was an urgent task from this perspective. In his view, the most important guarantees of individual liberty were freedom of movement, as well as that of speech and the press, scientific research, artistic activity and education, and the assurance of equal rights to education. He demanded legal guarantees to assure the personal safety of individuals and the confidentiality of private correspondence. He wanted to legalize the right of petition, the right of assembly and of public meeting, and the right to acquire and sell property without restriction. He supported the principle of religious toleration and fought for the equality of all religions and beliefs. He demanded the separation of Church and State, and fought to prefer civil marriages over religious ones. Since the Habsburg Monarchy was a multi-national state, he proposed that the constitution grant freedom and equal rights to all nations within the empire. As far as political rights were concerned, most liberals supported the introduction of a wider representative system, but they never talked explicitly about general and universal suffrage. In the ensuing decade, these principles remained a strong part of the Czech liberal canon; time and social development slightly modified them, but in essence the principles remained the same. It is natural and understandable, of course, that in the 1850s, under the neo-absolutist regime, there was nothing in Czech social life that could have been compared to the radicalism of 1848–49. The failure of an expected natural and spontaneous constitutional development led to a certain disillu-

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sionment and skepticism. Consequently, in the 1860s, when constitutional aspirations revived, the tone of liberal demands was much more subdued. At this time, liberals were very cautious not to refer to the traditions of the 1848 Revolution in an obvious way. The pressure for change still originated ‘from below,’ but in the resulting programs, the whole process of change was confirmed and controlled from above. The fight for civil and political rights remained one of the main elements of Czech liberal politics, but in practice its demands more and more often met the requirements of the existing national and government policy. The demand for the general liberalization of public life was a liberal commonplace in all nation-states which were in transition from absolutism to constitutional government. In a way, it was therefore natural that the Habsburg administration was ready to tolerate these demands, up to a point. Bourgeois human rights were always realized in particular historical forms, through the incorporation of different legal changes. The most important change in this respect was the December Constitution of 1867, which concerned the non-Hungarian part of the Monarchy. The volume and the practical accuracy of the laws referring to human rights within the December Constitution did not attain the perfection of the 1849 constitutional draft of Krom±rˇíπ (Kremsier). Nevertheless, the December Constitution was undoubtedly a real breakthrough, introducing radically new practices in social and political life. Although the general political circumstances and the possibilities for a more active public life had improved substantially, the political system became more rigid and antidemocratic. The so-called curial parliamentary system was based on privilege, as a result of which most of the population was excluded from politics. Under these favorable circumstances, liberalism lost most of its original progressive character and social effectiveness. The revolutionary reform ideology had changed into a ‘conservative’ ideology, a stabilizing factor in the new social system and political regime. As far as particular civil and political rights were concerned, the liberals of the non-Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy were able to achieve some minor results. The possibilities for the Czech liberals were highly restricted by the fact that their constitutional fight had been lost, both from the national and the state political points of view. They were unable to realize their social and political program, and their fight for federalism and national emancipation was lost. As a result of their failure, many people became hesitant as far as the values of bourgeois human rights were concerned. This, in a direct or indirect way, brought grist to the mill of different non- or anti-liberal tendencies. The autocratic, pseudo-absolutist ideologies of the time did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity, and skillfully manipulated Czech public opinion.

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The fact that by this time liberalism in general had reached its limits—and, as far as the Czechs were concerned, had failed—opened up new possibilities for the radical-democratic trend. Three decades after 1848, the formerly young and enthusiastic revolutionary generation had become ‘old’ and conservative, and subjected to harsh radical criticism of the kind the liberals themselves had used against the conservatives decades earlier. The young Czech liberal democrats were becoming increasingly vehement in pointing out the social limitations and inconsistency of the decisions adopted by the old liberals, and launched, in parallel, an open attack on the antidemocratic curial parliamentary system. After the 1850s the old, classical version of Czech liberalism was unable to keep pace with the times; its social and intellectual horizons became limited, and the whole ideology gradually disappeared. At the same time, the social and class struggle was becoming increasingly strong, and unfortunately the young radical democrats had little chance of formulating a modern conception of how to democratize society. It is a telling fact—and one typical of the Czech situation—that this modern and comprehensive program of democratization was finally born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was conceived by T. G. Masaryk, a university professor, in the course of a dispute with liberalism. Masaryk condemned the ‘amoral practice’ of utilitarianism and the narrowminded rationalism of liberalism. He worked out a unique historical, philosophical, and sociological system, and interpreted human rights in accordance with these special views on man and society and the world. At the same time, he never rejected the legacy of European liberalism, adopting more ideas from it, both theoretical and practical, than he ever admitted. Masaryk’s theory of humanist democracy represents one of the highlights of Czech liberal thought and of human thinking in general. His interpretation of human existence was in some ways the climax of the whole period.

2. The Czech bourgeoisie always interpreted human and political rights in the context of national identity. Thus, national consciousness and identity were always integral parts of Czech bourgeois consciousness and identity. A Czech wanted to be free not only as a human being in an abstract sense but also as a person of Czech nationality. Given the situation of Czech society, this position was understandable from both the historical and the social points of view. At the same time, it gave a special perspective to the Czech liberals’ interpretation of the nation and the state. As far as the concept of ‘nation’ was concerned, Czech political thinking adopted the interpretation of the Romantic philosophy of nature very quickly, adopting the original concept as it

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appeared in German classical philosophy, especially in the works of Herder, but adapting it to the Czech situation. According to this interpretation, ‘nation’ was an ahistorical ‘legal and moral entity’; an existing, natural, and concrete basis for every human society. The nation and the people were substantive categories, and as such they had the right to arrange their life and existence according to their own collective will. From this point of view, ‘nation’ was an authentic category, while the ‘state’ was only a derivative one. That is why the nation and the people had the right to emancipate themselves from the political structures of the absolutist state, if they found them unsuitable and inappropriate, and to establish themselves as a modern, self-controlling social group, creating a new, bourgeois society, based on a social contract. This liberal Czech nationalism was basically the result of the social debates of the 1840s. It was a new, modern nationalism, which exceeded the original, Romantic, and humanist nationalism of the enlightened patriots. In 1848, Franti≥ek Palack§ undertook a comprehensive philosophical–political analysis of the relationship between nation and state. For Palack§, the nation was the most basic category of political thought. He thought that nations existed for their own sake. State mechanisms served only as means of realizing the existence of a nation, and, as such, were ephemeral and historically transient. It is not very difficult to identify in this the liberal argument according to which the function of the state was subordinated to society—in this case, to national society. For a number of reasons, étatism could never become a strong tendency in Czech society, and, to a certain extent, it was opposed to the national idea. It is true that étatism had some historical roots and traditions in contemporary Czech society, but they were weak and their influence almost insignificant. Czech society was without its own state, which made its situation ambiguous and contradictory. On the one hand, from a general political and national point of view, the Czechs had to reject the existing state; on the other, they had to strive to create their own nationstate. This is why they were always torn between two extremes. On the one hand, they were fighting ‘against the state’ and its mechanisms and rules, and, on the other, they had to keep alive state-building potential and creativity. When Palack§ contrived his program, he was fully aware of all these problems. Although he was clearly against the growing centralist structures of the Habsburg Monarchy, he argued for preserving the unity of the Empire. He did so because he understood how complex the status quo was in Central Europe, with its confusing and intricate ethnic relations. He sought guarantees for the small and medium-sized nations in Central Europe to develop in safety, given the threat to their existence from the superpowers. He hoped that the political unity of the Habsburg Empire would defend the Czech nation from the power colossuses of

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the region, like the unifying Germany and Tsarist Russia. Amidst the strengthening centralizing and integrating tendencies all over the world, Palack§ did not see any realistic possibility for the small nations of Central Europe to survive the turmoil of the age under a completely independent and isolated form of government. On the whole European continent, as he realized later, the interests of individual nations were so interwoven that it was absolutely impossible for any nation to pursue a sovereign policy and to ignore the interests of its neighbors. Careful analysis of Palack§’s texts reveals that he considered the Austrian question an open issue as far as territorial consequences were concerned. He had a federal government in mind, uniting all the nations from the Baltic to the Aegean. When he was working on this plan, he probably used the existing territory of Austria as a natural starting point. At the same time, being fully aware of the extreme difficulties the implementation of such a long-term plan would involve, he tried to adapt it to the emerging power structures and relations in Europe. That is why he was consistent in his insistence on a constitutional monarchy. He rejected the republican form of government and emphasized his loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty, which he considered an integrative and unifying force in the multi-national empire. Even if we ignore the fact that in the given period of Czech history the republican solution was completely unrealistic, and postulate this version as a theoretical possibility, we have to see that this solution would have entailed the total destruction of the old social and political structures. The republican solution was impossible, not only as a ‘destructive’ solution, but as a positive, constructive one, because the introduction of a republican form of government would have required a much more developed and sophisticated level of social development, general education, and civil independence. Palack§’s liberal interpretation of nation and state, presented at the 1848–49 Constituent Assembly, which discussed the federalization possibilities of Austria, remained an interesting historical document. In the 1850s, during the consolidation period, his program was completely ignored. After the revolutions the direction of social development had changed completely. After the failure of the ‘Spring of Nations,’ national development ceased to be a real possibility for the Czechs. Centralizing tendencies were becoming increasingly strong and governmental structures extremely rigid. The nationalities and nationality structures of the Monarchy were taken into consideration as “unavoidably bad” and not as possible constituent elements of state power. During the whole history of the Habsburg Empire there had never been a wider gap between state and society—between state and national societies—than during this time. This antagonism between state and nation caused irreparable damage as far as later liberal interpretations of nation and state and the

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possibilities of reform were concerned. To make things worse, at the beginning of the 1860s the state grew stronger than ever and the transitional process, from an absolutist to a constitutional form of government, became extremely slow. The state preserved all its positions and prevailed in every sphere of life. All initiatives from below were frozen and the liberal leaders of individual nations no longer made an effort to find reasonable compromises. Instead, they launched a cruel struggle against other nations, as a result of which nationalism lost its humanistic elements. This distorted, dehumanized version of nationalism—which often turned into narrow-minded chauvinism—also deformed the originally noble and valuable elements of the liberal interpretation of ‘nation.’ Consequently, the latter gradually became a hotbed of racism, national intolerance, and a primitive and chauvinist antihumanism. As soon as the individual nations of the Monarchy started to fight for their own nation-state, a retrospective reevaluation of the theory itself was conducted. Czech liberalism stepped back from the idea of ethnic federalization and started to place more emphasis on the concept of the historical–political entity as a counterbalance to centralism. It was Palack§ who conceptualized the Czech version of this ideology. He did not change his original starting point and still considered the ethnic solution the best. He still found it inevitable that the small nations of Central Europe must co-operate at the state level. Nevertheless, he was ready to accept the more conservative and ‘imperfect’ solution of realizing an historical–political entity. He drew the necessary consequences, which meant that, from this time on, he strongly emphasized the historical relations of Czech political law and the political identity of the countries of the Czech Crown. As a result of these changes, aspects of political law came to the fore, which, in an indirect way, made étatist tendencies even stronger. The dualist Compromise of 1867 shook this process at its foundations, and brought with it a new development. This solution denied not only the principles of an ethnically based federalism, but—in a more general, imperial sense—it denied the principles of an historical–legal federalism. The dualist compromise denied even the principles of a distorted, dualist federalism, which was actually a simple duplication of centralism. Although it was meant to be a transitional power solution, it did not become the starting point of any fundamental positive political development in Bohemia, especially not in the German–Czech relations. In Czech society the realized dualism heavily undermined the identification and loyalty to the Habsburg Empire. Czechs started to consider the Habsburg state as a ‘foreign power’ from both a national and a political point of view. As if this were not complicated enough, although the 1867 constitutional laws completely ignored the existence of Czech society as a state

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constituting a political entity, they assured the possibility of a “free national development.” This was one of the inconsistencies that finally led to the disintegration of the Monarchy. Although Czech society could not expect any direct state assistance for a while, it did not have to be afraid of assimilation or national oppression. Despite the unfavorable circumstances, since spontaneous activities could not be hindered by any drastic means, the economic, cultural, and even political potential within Czech society started to develop at a relatively rapid pace, preparing the way for the Czechs’ appearance on the political stage at the turn of the nineteenth century. The whole process of this development was carefully planned. In the contemporary statements and programs of different liberal parties we meet more and more theoretical reflections on the issue. Nevertheless, it never became a serious topic of deeper analysis or part of consequential political or philosophical theories. Except for the Social Democrats before the First World War, no Czech politician spoke about the Austrian question as a theoretical problem after the 1870s. No one sought to reform the governmental structure of the empire. The issue became important only from 1914 on. After this date we can see a radical change in the attitude of the Czech liberals towards the Austrian government. The second half of the nineteenth century brought changes in Czech society that had a long-lasting psychological impact on Czech thought and attitudes. Despite the fact that Czech society was extremely divided and there were huge disagreements between the different social strata, it was unanimous on one issue. Although the general attitude towards the Habsburg dynasty had changed a lot, until 1918 the Austrian state was basically considered a foreign power in the eyes of the Czechs. Their lack of autonomy induced a feeling of alienation in the general public and, at the same time, a kind of irresponsibility. Statements like “they control us” or “they decide” had not only a social and class basis but also a strong national connotation. The Czechs compensated for their offended feelings and insignificance by naive nationalistic exaggerations. In fact, Austria did not oppress the Czechs and did not suffocate their national development. At the same time, it is true that Austria did not allow the Czechs to develop a healthy and positive relationship with a rationally arranged state power.

3. One of the main postulates of the liberal program was the need to enhance general education as an indispensable requirement of asserting human rights and changing social structures. Considering the general circumstances prevailing in Czech society, it was natural that boosting

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national life and extending school and extramural education were key demands of the Czech liberals. Compared to the German educational system, in the Czech provinces and the neighboring regions education was in an exceptionally bad state. Both vertically and horizontally the Czech system was poorly developed. During the Enlightenment and the succeeding enlightened absolutism, when German influence was very strong, Czech education became stuck at the elementary level; secondary education, in accordance with the requirements of the state, remained German. It is true that the Czech language was still taught in Czech secondary schools and universities—from 1792, for example, at the University of Prague—but, except for a few rare examples, it was not the language of education. Most of the time it remained the private interest of literary historians and linguists. The cultivation and elaboration of the Czech language was therefore an elementary requirement and one of the prime demands of the Czech Liberals. The development of the education system was just as important. They required the expansion of Czech language education and wanted to build up a whole network of grammar schools and secondary vocational schools. They demanded that Czech be the language of education at the University of Prague. At the end of the nineteenth century, a university was established in Bohemia and Czech was introduced as the language of education. If we consider that this was the only Czech university in the whole Central European region, and that there were more than thirty German universities, we can understand what the Czech language was up against. This was, of course, much more than a cultural question; it was a national political issue. The Czech liberals elaborated the main principles of their educational program in the early 1840s. In 1848 they were ready to present a comprehensive program. During the Revolution they demanded the complete emancipation of the Czech language in every sphere and at every level of education. However, the achievements of 1848 never came to fruition. It was only in the 1860s that the issue of education received a new boost. During the next two or three decades the liberals managed to realize most of the points of their cultural program. This was when the basic structures of modern Czech education were built up, both horizontally and vertically, and the primary conditions of a dynamic national development were created. Czech culture started to develop rapidly, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results were soon visible. The arts and sciences flourished. Many books were published, Czech literature became far more popular, and scientific culture became widespread. By the last decade of the nineteenth century there was practically no

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illiteracy in the Czech territories. Given the social circumstances and the potential for financial gain in the area, the general public had more opportunities to acquire a higher level of education than before. Liberalization and the recent democratization of the educational system served as a secure basis for the later development of Czech society. Parallel to the development of the educational system, liberalism stimulated relatively rapid progress in all fields of general public education. Museums and local historical societies were established; the network of public libraries grew rapidly, their number rising to three thousand by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the second half of the nineteenth century the number of publishing houses and bookshops multiplied. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Czech publishing, in relation to both number of titles and copies printed, was among the most active in the Monarchy. Reading became a customary activity for more and more Czech people. Reading and amateur dramatic societies, which stimulated popular activity and creativity to a high degree, were gaining increasing importance. Culture and politics generally went hand in hand in these associations. The liberal press had an extremely important role in the Czech territories. Due to the efforts of Karel Havlí∑ek, liberal journalism had traditions which preceded 1848, but the real ‘date of birth’ of the Czech liberal press was March 1848. After a promising start, its development slowed down in the 1850s, and in 1860–61 practically everything had to start again from scratch. From this time on, for a few decades, the different liberal newspapers, backed by different political parties, and the increasingly popular political pamphlets not only reflected Czech political public opinion, but actively formed it, and became a direct means in the political struggle. Czech liberal journalism managed to maintain its position even in the declining years of liberalism at the end of the century, when new, more radical and critical trends and parties emerged on the scene. The Church and religion had a unique position in the Czech territories. The liberal Czech bourgeoisie, including a significant part of the rural populace, had a unique practical attitude and indifference towards questions of religion and the Church. In a way, this was a natural consequence of previous historical traditions and important changes in attitudes towards the Catholic Church, which necessarily led to a relativism of religious stereotypes. The re-Catholicization efforts of the Baroque period, which took place in the feudal Hussite state, were successful on the surface, but in reality could never wipe out the memory of the previous, most glorious period of Czech history. This effort proved to be even more futile at the turn of the eighteenth century, when the Hussite past was an inherent and active part of the reviving Czech national identity. This situation was actually the result of serious contradictions

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between general political and specifically national issues. The Catholic Church had to reject Hus and Hussite tenets, of course, but at the same time the priests, especially at the lowest level, were fully aware of the national content of Hussitism. Huss could and had to be condemned as an unorthodox and apostate Catholic, but he could not be ignored as a prominent Czech thinker of European importance. Under such circumstances, and for other social and national reasons, the Catholic Church was unable to become a national church in the Czech provinces. There was always some link between modern nationalism, Czech national identity, and modern Catholicism, but the relationship was always full of conflict. Even during the most harmonious periods, Czech national identity never identified itself with Catholicism. Nevertheless, besides some prominent Protestant thinkers such as Palack§, the lower tier of the Catholic Church, especially during the first period of the Enlightenment and in the pre-liberal era of patriotism, always played an exceptionally valuable role in the national life of the Czech people. That is why the liberals, mainly under the influence of Karel Havlí∑ek, never criticized or denounced the Catholic religion itself. In 1848–49, for example, when they launched a sharp attack against the prelates and the absolutist internal and external hierarchy of the Church, they were very cautious and tolerant as far as Catholicism itself was concerned. In 1849, at the plenary meeting of the Constituent Assembly, they fought for the principle of religious toleration and the equality of all religions. They demanded that religious belief be referred to the private sphere and be a matter of individual conscience. These were the main principles that liberal thought would later develop. The situation became more complex at the beginning of the 1870s, when political Ultramontanism emerged as a new trend. The conservative wing of Czech political life, which endeavored to cooperate with all parties and trends which showed some conservative or clerical inclinations, remained reserved and followed a policy of neutrality. This was actually a step back from the intolerant form of Catholicism which, in combat against the latest achievements of modern technology and science, proclaimed its rigid dogmas. There was a small group of literati and thinkers among the Young Czech Liberals of the time, who gave up the policy of neutrality and launched an attack against the Catholic Church, and partly against the regressive and reactionary aspects of the Catholic priesthood. This resulted in a further loosening of the relationship between Czech public opinion and the Catholic Church. At this time many people converted from Catholicism or became atheists. The final break with Catholic traditions took place at the end of the nineteenth century, the crucial step being taken by Masaryk and his philosophy of religion. Masaryk was a true believer in Protestantism, and he was equally categorical in his rejection of both atheism and Catholi-

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cism. He interpreted basic historical and national issues in a unique way and assigned a substantial religious content to them. The most evident manifestation of this religious content was the Hussite Reformation. He regarded the modern reformation of his time as a “second Czech Reformation,” the revival of the principle of brotherhood and humanism. When Masaryk evaluated his own age, he measured it against his liberal-democratic principles. His philosophy emanated from original national sources. Since these sources had become muddied over time, he thought it one of his most important tasks to purify them of all the inorganic and worthless sediments of later periods. He then tried to enrich them with the latest positive achievements. Masaryk’s philosophy represented the peak of nineteenth-century Czech liberalism in this respect.

4. A number of social and economic characteristics of the Czech bourgeoisie meant that modern economic theories found it difficult to penetrate Czech society. Apart from serious internal difficulties, such as a lack of tradition and the slow pace of development of Czech enterprise, there was an important external fact which hindered the development of bourgeois thinking in the Czech territories. Economic liberalism, both as doctrine and practice, found a much more enthusiastic welcome among the Austrian and German bourgeoisie; both the Austrians and the Germans could draw on much stronger economic potential and far more sophisticated traditions as far as economic thinking was concerned. Although in the second half of the nineteenth century sporadic elements of this new economic thinking emerged in Czech economic culture, the non-material aspects of national-political emancipation found much more understanding and support in society. In the 1860s, the ‘materialists’ made timid attempts to air their views in the press, but the ‘idealists,’ who condemned undignified and disgraceful “looting,” were much more visible. This debate took place in the middle of the classical period of economic liberalism, when free enterprise was flourishing and seemed to have unlimited possibilities. Although in practice the Czech bourgeoisie wanted its fair share of the economic boom, the theory of economics and every initiative concerning economic emancipation were harshly suppressed. Enterprise began to develop in the Czech territories only in the 1880s, by which time the classical period of economic liberalism in the rest of Europe was over. With the establishment of the University of Prague, modern Czech economic thinking was finally given a permanent base. The modern Czech economic school was founded by two prominent professors in Prague, Albín Bráf and Jozef Kaizl, who mediated the

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ideas of European economic theories to the Czech public and adapted them to Czech circumstances. At the turn of the century Czech capital was becoming increasingly strong, which provided an excellent opportunity for these scholars to reflect on the Czech emancipation process in a radically new fashion. Similar to the practical politicians of later times, they were able to revise the old emancipation program in accordance with the requirements of the age. They showed how inadequate the previous generations’ approach had been and how they had neglected numerous crucial issues. As a result, Albín Bráf was able to present a completely new liberal program of emancipation. His main postulate was that, after periods during which the emphasis had been placed first on linguistics and literature, then on politics and culture (as well as another phase of political emancipation), it was economics which must now be brought to the fore. He demanded that the nation move beyond its earlier, relatively passive attitude of merely expecting national emancipation, and do something active to achieve economic liberation and competitiveness in the European market. By this time, Czech capital had managed to overcome its timidity and felt strong enough to enter the open field of competition. The Czech bourgeoisie adopted the new political program of economic expansion and began to realize it both at home and abroad. Owing to the delayed development of Czech economic thought, Herbert Spencer’s antisocial liberalism never had any influence on Czech society. In the 1880s, when Czech liberal economic thinking started to take a more complex and systematic form, the egotistic-utilitarian concepts of economic liberalism—according to which economic interests strive towards a natural equilibrium, even if this entails the partial destruction of some participants in the economic process—could not have any real impact on Czech liberal thought. At the time, John Stuart Mill’s social liberalism was more relevant, and much more influential in Bohemia, too. This was also the time when the original legal bases and conditions of economic activity were being reconsidered and revised, and the state launched its first social and political program. As a result, the conditions and possibilities of economic activities had changed considerably and economic competition became subject to restrictions. The representatives of the Czech economic school, accommodating themselves to the requirements of the age, tried to bring their economic and social principles into line. They took all the latest social ideologies into consideration, including socialism (inasmuch as it was not based on collectivist principles), which they regarded as a radical version of liberalism. It was no accident that at the beginning of the twentieth century so many Czech economists professed a kind of academic socialism and used it to try to find solutions to the most crucial problems of the period.

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III. The crisis of 1848–49 did not take the Czech liberals completely by surprise. The debates in the recently established museum and in the new associations, civic societies, and informal circles allowed the liberals to elaborate their standpoint. In 1848, the Habsburg absolutist regime collapsed, an event to which the Prague bourgeoisie contributed in an indirect way. In March 1848, after the fall of the absolutist system, the liberals, together with other dissidents, formed a block called ‘Direction of Movement,’ which managed to pull together all the progressive trends in society, from the moderate reformists to the more radical democrats. Differentiation and the growth of factions along party lines were later developments.

1. Despite some disagreement, a common platform was formed on the most important issues, such as fundamental national demands and the continued existence of Austria. The differences were only accentual. There was some dissension on tactical questions, such as how emphatic they should be in expressing their demands, or on general principles, such as how far they should go in their calls for democracy. The reformists— especially Palack§, Rieger, and Havlí∑ek—wished to build on existing achievements and intended to move slowly, in accordance with the new social-political principles. The radical democrats, led by Karel Sabina and Karel Sladkovsk§, were more impatient. Under the influence of the Viennese radicals, they wanted to go further and strove to prepare the way for more radical social and political changes. The defeat of the June insurrection in Prague represented a serious loss for the Radicals, one from which it took them some time to recover. The defeat weakened the position of the liberal movement as a whole. After the defeat, Czech liberalism was represented almost exclusively by its moderate wing, which survived the revolutionary turbulence with fewer losses and awoke from the shock much earlier. These reformist liberals attempted to introduce a ‘constructive’ policy of gradual progress, and concentrated their efforts on legal activities within the framework of the Constituent Assembly. The other faction, the Radicals, had little influence on the reform process, because they were not represented where ‘real’ politics were practised, on the Imperial Council. After the uprising, most of them were in detention or in hiding. It was only at the end of the summer, when there was a new crisis on the horizon in Vienna, that the radical democrats could try to exert pressure on the government through the press; they did not have sufficient time to achieve significant results, however.

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Through its efforts to achieve a balance between the old form of despotism and the new form of anarchy, by September 1848 the liberal mainstream had completely lost its footing. Its representatives had underestimated the imminent danger of counter-revolution. Their fatalistic optimism in the continuity of evolution and the irreversibility of progress did not serve the politically naive supporters of liberalism as a reliable guide. They unquestionably believed in progress, the most important achievements of which even the Emperor was obliged to sanction. But this political short-sightedness was not exclusively their fault. National prejudices and the inability of Central European leaders to acknowledge one another and seek reasonable compromises to solve basic problems were also important factors. Neither were the Czech liberal leaders exceptions in this respect. When an uprising broke out in Vienna in 1848, they could not take advantage of it because they were unable to put their narrow national interests to one side for the benefit of general common interests. Fears of a plot against the Monarchy, which they thought would threaten the existence of the Slav nations in Central Europe, led them to ignore important issues and the need to maintain a healthy balance between the considerations of liberty and nation. It was only after they had realized how shocking the consequences of defeat would be, and how the October uprising of Vienna had affected the throne and the government, that the Czech liberals began to oppose the regime of Felix Schwarzenberg. In a last-minute measure, under very uncertain circumstances, they endeavored to defend the legal and political positions they had achieved in the spring of 1848. The Bohemian Crownlands were, to a certain extent, in an advantageous position because, in the winter of 1848 and the spring of 1849, it was the only part of the Monarchy in which no state of emergency had been introduced and where political activity was still possible. Political life was not greatly restricted, something which also stimulated the development of Czech radicalism. The increasing activity of the Radicals also put pressure on the Czech liberals on the Imperial Council. The various meetings and petitions organized by the Radicals were an effort to support the activities of the Czech liberals on the Imperial Council and made the Radicals very popular in the eyes of the public. Czech public opinion seemed to have recovered completely after the shock of 1848; there were increasing signs of sympathy towards the Hungarian Revolution, especially after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at the beginning of March, which left no doubts about the intentions of the Austrian government. In the spring of 1849, the situation had become more tense in Bohemia than it had ever been in 1848. Besides Hungary, where the struggle was still being waged, Bohemia became another center of opposition. In addition, the Czech opposition could have co-ordinated its activities

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with the operations of the Saxon revolutionary forces, but, at the beginning of May, before public opinion had been sufficiently radicalized, the government intervened. Before long, most of the Radicals, including many students, had been imprisoned. Now Prague and its immediate vicinity could experience the ‘blessings’ of a state of emergency. The military dictatorship, which was in serious difficulties in Hungary, needed a hinterland in Bohemia to secure its positions. In May 1849 severe police oppression was implemented in Bohemia, which had a drastic effect on the whole liberal movement, especially the Radical Democrats, most of whom received long prison sentences. The political activity of the moderate centrists was also seriously restricted, as a result of which they almost completely disintegrated by the end of 1849. Parliamentary activity was still out of the question, and the scope for political writing was becoming more and more limited. Karel Havlí∑ek was a rare exception; as the last defender of the principles of constitutionalism he did not throw in the towel until 1851. By the beginning of the 1850s, liberal Czech politics had ceased to be a force. The government introduced an overtly absolutist regime and liberal politics came to a halt.

2. The situation began to change, if slowly, only after the military defeat of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1859. The Monarchy promised significant changes, but public opinion remained suspicious. The spontaneous activity between 1860–61 could by no means be compared to that of 1848– 1849. No spontaneous movements were organized from ‘below’ during this period, and the bourgeoisie seemed hesitant. At the beginning of 1861, during the parliamentary electoral campaign, and after cautious exploratory talks and a series of informal meetings, the liberal Czech National Party was established as the representative political force of the Czech bourgeoisie. The liberals were completely excluded from the preliminary talks. They could neither get onto the Imperial Council nor take part in the preparation of the 1861 constitutional laws. Even the name ‘National Party’ was significant. Now, after the denial of every national principle for a decade, the national political principle was emphasized for tactical and ideological reasons. The more general liberal demands were more or less taken for granted in the political platform of the new party at the beginning of 1861. It was assumed that the liberal demands would not give rise to social conflict, and that it would be only a matter of time before their gradual implementation. The most important question was the future of Czech society, within the framework of a constitutional Habsburg Empire.

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This issue was of concern not only to the Czechs; it also involved all the national communities under the Monarchy. Nevertheless, since these national communities were very different in size, strength, political activity and inherited position, there was no universal solution to the problem. The Czech liberals usually listened to the Austrian-German liberals when seeking solutions. There is no doubt that the latter represented the mainstream of liberalism in the region, being strongest in the reform block that strove to transform the absolutist monarchy into a constitutional state. As such, they were almost ‘predestined’ to be an integrating force and a close and natural ally for most national liberal forces. The reason that (contrary to all expectations) this did not happen was that, under the Habsburg Monarchy, distinctive political features were organized not according to general political or ideological characteristics but according to national political interests. While 1848–49 symbolized an—at least ephemeral—victory of initiatives ‘from below,’ after 1860 this possibility was completely excluded. Under the pressure of circumstances, the Austro-German liberals, although with many reservations, finally accepted Schmerling’s laws—imposed ‘from above’—in February 1861. This entailed becoming a Party loyal to the constitution and, as such, effectively identifying themselves with the concept of a centralized constitutional Austria. In contrast to the Czech liberals, who had to fight for the recognition of a Czech national society, the Austro-German liberals did not have to emphasize national issues at this time, because they represented a fully operational national society. National antagonisms within the Monarchy reached such a pitch that it never even occurred to individual national liberal forces to cooperate or to establish, horribile dictu, a unified ‘non-national’ liberal party in the region. In this respect, bourgeois liberalism was very different from Austrian Socialism and its Social Democrat party of a later period. Divisions within the liberal parties logically resulted not only in their weakening but in the strengthening of other conservative or otherwise non-liberal parties. From a geo-political point of view, Czech national identity was closely related to the existence of the state of Bohemia and the Bohemian Crownlands. In the first half of the 1860s, the Czech liberal bourgeoisie, as represented by the National Party, accepted the same concept of historical–political identity as did the Hungarian politicians who professed the doctrine of the Holy Crown and re-claimed the integrity of the Hungary of Saint Stephan’s Crownlands (with Croatia and Transylvania). Their political behavior was similar in many respects, especially in their relationship to Schmerling’s Imperial Council. Nevertheless, there was a very important difference between the Hungarians and the Czechs. In Hungary, there was no controversy about principles; there were argu-

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ments concerning the ways and means of restoring the statehood of Hungary or the meaning of the concept of sovereignty, but there was unanimity about principles. In Bohemia, the situation was completely different. Schmerling and his advisers determined constituency borders in such a way that it would be impossible, both formally and practically, for the liberals to gain a majority in the provincial assemblies. Although two-thirds of the population in Bohemia were of Czech origin, they were given only about one-third of the seats in the provincial assembly. All their attempts to revise the rules were unsuccessful. Another onethird of the seats were taken by the representatives of the county aristocracy and the big landowners, nationally mixed or indifferent in the sense of a historical Bohemian territorial patriotism. The last third of the seats were occupied by the German liberals. Since neither the German nor the Czech liberals were able to determine the main direction and political profile of legislation on their own, both had to form a coalition with the aristocracy. This was made easier by the fact that the German and the Czech liberals were sworn enemies. The Germans let them have their own culture, language, and literature, their own songs and poems, and allowed them to cultivate their own folk and other traditions, but there was one thing they would not tolerate: they were not ready to accept Czech society as an independent and autonomous cultural and political group, striving to realize its political identity as a state. In the eyes of the German liberals, Bohemia was an historical part of the administrative system characterized by outdated state political traditions. They considered it as an independent element of administration, but nothing more. It was natural for them that Bohemia and the Bohemian Crownlands should constitute an integral part of a unified Austrian Empire. This was obviously another aspect that distinguished the Czech problem not only from the Hungarian, but also from the Polish, Galician, and Southern Slav ones. The Czech liberals approached the question from another point of view, of course. To them, the Bohemian lands, the lands of the Crown of Saint Venceslaus (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) were real territories with a real historical and political identity. These territories had their own state political traditions and thus had a natural right, justified by the existence of two-thirds of the population, to organize themselves into an independent political entity, even if still within a federalized Habsburg state. The interpretation of the Czech liberals in this respect was diametrically opposed to that of the German liberals, which made communication, let alone co-operation, very difficult. It is interesting to mention that at this time, in the 1860s and 70s, liberal politics in Vienna were no longer the business of foreigners or Viennese lawyers alone, but were usually conducted by politicians whose lives and careers were closely connected to the Bohemian Crownlands. They were also the

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followers of Austro-German liberal politics and propagated the idea of a unified Cisleithanian Austria. The liberal Czech National Party, which relied morally on the principles of Palack§, but in practical matters followed the instructions of F. L. Rieger, stepped up its activities considerably in the 1860s. After a number of bad experiences in Vienna in 1863, its representatives left the Imperial Council. Over the next sixteen years they boycotted the meetings of the Council and restricted their political activity to the Bohemian provincial assembly. They interpreted the Czech problem and the issue of Bohemian statehood on the basis of historical rights. In the 1860s they aired these views in numerous speeches and lectures. The most famous and compact assertion of these principles was the Czech Declaration, published on 22 August 1868. Since the Bohemian provincial assembly was politically divided, in practical political life they always had to cooperate with allies in the conservative camp, a hindrance which severely restricted the possibilities of liberal politics. In the middle of the 1860s, a strong conservative party of the old Bohemian (Böhmisch) aristocracy developed among the representatives of the large landowners and county aristocracy in the Bohemian provincial assembly. The Böhmisch aristocracy was a creature of the Habsburg dynasty from the seventeenth century onwards as one of the consequences of the members of the earlier Czech aristocracy having been executed or cleared out after the Weissenberg (White Mountain) battle. They were of German origin and cultural background, but all acquired a territorial, that is, Bohemian consciousness, so correctly, in the second half of the nineteenth century, they should already be called old Bohemian aristocratic families. These famous old Böhmisch aristocratic families, such as the Schwarzenbergs, the Lobkowitzs, the Clam-Martinics, the Thuns and the Nostics were represented in this party, which had its own conservative historico–political concept regarding the Czech territories. From this position, under particular circumstances, it was occasionally ready to support the Czech liberals, although whenever it did so—for example, in 1865–66, under the government of Belcredi, and in 1871, under the Hohenwart government—it was on condition that the initiative be ‘legitimized’ from above and that they be able to preserve their ‘loyalty’ to the Habsburgs. Although, as partners and allies, the liberals always tried to take the conservatives’ point of view into consideration, they followed an active and independent policy within the coalition. However tangible the Austrian–Czech compromise seemed to be in 1871, for many different reasons the attempt at a Czech coalition failed again. The dualistic political structure of the Monarchy, as well as the political structure of the Cisleithanian territories, remained intact. After a short period of intense political struggles for the transformation of the state structure, for a while Czech liberal politics reached a deadlock. As

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a result of other types of concessions and the modification of the constitution in 1873, Austria was able to exist and prosper even without Bohemia. Although the Czech opposition continued for a time, and, with the boycott of the Czech provincial assembly, became larger, the hope that another 1871 might come soon was delusive. After three decades of wars, struggle, and political and governmental changes, Europe wished for peace. The European powers wanted to let the new situation and the newly developed structures stabilize, as the 1878 Congress of Berlin demonstrated. There was little chance of a power crisis in the near future which could have turned the Czech question into an international problem, in contrast to the Polish and the Southern Slav cases, both of which had been transformed into European issues. The development of Czech society was strictly a matter for the Habsburg Monarchy. At the beginning of the 1880s the Czech National Party—the leading liberal party at the time—analyzed the new situation. It examined the practical possibilities available in internal and external politics, and decided to revise its tactics in a radical way. Formally, the liberals did not renounce their original principles and goals; the establishment of a Czech nation-state remained the ultimate purpose of their program, but they gave up the policy of negation and passivity. This radical change was made possible by the formation of the Taaffe government and the development of a new constellation within the Austrian parliament. The Czech liberals were gradually gaining ground. They decided to confine their activities to the given constitutional framework, and sometimes appeared to renounce their wide-ranging political and governmental program to emphasize more partial, cultural, educational, and linguistic objectives. Among other things, they wanted to extend the Czech education and cultural systems, and fought for the introduction of the Czech language in offices across the region. The purpose of the new tactics was to fight for the state rather than against it, gradually building up the inner structures of Czech society, in preparation for the ultimate goal, the establishment of their own nation-state. The earlier maximalist politics of ‘everything or nothing’ in the face of the government’s ‘injustice and evil’ were replaced in the 1860s and 70s. The liberals admitted that earlier on they had fought for goals which, within the framework of the existing social structure, could not have been achieved. In the 1880s, they seemed to confine their struggles to insignificant objectives, which sometimes could be achieved only through compromise with the conservatives. In contrast to the 1860s, when the Czech liberals had preserved their independence to a large degree, in the 1880s they formed a coalition with the Czech historical nobility and other conservative forces, establishing a strong unifying force. All these changes led to the inner crises of the liberal movement in the 1890s,

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which it tried to solve with another comprehensive policy revision. At the same time, the seemingly ‘trivial’ benefits of the 1880s had in fact brought about important changes in society, creating better opportunities for its later development and making the liberals’ cultural program easier to realize at a later stage. The Austro-German liberal politicians, who were forced into opposition in the 1880s, realized that the constitutional changes made it possible to govern without the participation of the German liberals. From the middle of the 1880s, like the Czech liberals of the previous two decades, they had to pay the price for their earlier policies. Their opposition to the Bohemian provincial assembly became a source of accumulating tension. The increased activity of the Czech liberals intensified their sense of danger in Bohemia and Moravia. At the same time, this attitude caused the Czech liberals to modify their program and to become more explicit in their demands. They began to seek the establishment of a closed German linguistic area within the Bohemian Crownlands. National conflicts became exceptionally pointed during the 1888 electoral campaign for the Bohemian provincial assembly, when even the Taaffe government felt compelled to try to find a solution to the crisis. It was Taaffe himself who initiated trilateral negotiations between the government and a number of Czech and German political parties in Vienna in January 1890. Long negotiations and highly problematic compromises resulted in the so-called ‘eleven Viennese clauses.’ At first glance this seemed to offer a viable and generally acceptable solution to the national problems of the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, but on closer inspection, the agreement offended the linguistic rights and aspirations to emancipation of both nations. The agreement provided for some purely German and some mixed Czech–German territories. At the same time, it did not contain any guarantees concerning the political unity and integrity of the territories. Czech public opinion interpreted this solution as an overt attempt to divide the territory of “Bohemian Crownlands” (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia), and rejected it. The adoption of the eleven Viennese clauses was the last significant political action of the Czech National Party. The party lost the trust of the Czech electorate, and, during the 1891 Imperial Council electoral campaign, it disappeared from the political stage forever. This event brought to an end an important period of Czech liberal politics.

3. The National Liberal Party went back to the democratic legacy of the 1848 Revolution. It was formed from the radical wing of the National Party within the framework of which it had started to shape an independent policy at the beginning of the 1860s. Several prominent Radi-

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cals, such as Karel Sladkovsk§, joined the new party, assuring some degree of continuity. Under Sladkovsk§’s influence, young bourgeois intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and journalists—including Julius and Eduard Grégr, Vit±zslav Hálek, and Jan Neruda—soon joined. The Radicals adopted a program of national and state political emancipation similar to that designed by the representatives of the National Party, although there were important differences involving much more than pure tactical-political nuances and interpretative emphasis. The main disagreement concerned how radical the party should be in ‘forcing’ the government to realize its demands. The Radicals were much more realistic now than their predecessors had been twenty years earlier. They were far more sensitive to the realities of the modern world and its new ideologies. They represented a characteristic materialist and positivist attitude and were decidedly anticlerical. On cultural questions they were consistently and unambiguously liberal. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that they were rather skeptical and less than enthusiastic about the more or less enforced coalition with the conservative Bohemian aristocracy. The leaders of the National Party endeavored to win over the Bohemian aristocracy and to ‘re-integrate’ it as a representative and influential part of Czech society. The Radicals had a new approach in this respect. They did not want to win over the aristocracy; rather they planned to build up a new national-political elite from ‘below,’ from among the common bourgeois citizenry. The state political struggles of the 1860s united the various social trends and papered over the differences to such a degree that, at least on the surface, Czech liberalism, represented by the National Party, could appear to constitute a united political force. Although the Radicals did not passively submit themselves to the official leadership—between 1867 and 1870 they were the main motivating force in the extra-parliamentary opposition—they did not have an independent, alternative program, and they did not leave the National Party. The political failure in 1871 of the Czech liberals’ attempt to change the state structure led to a deepening crisis within the National Party. All the hidden theoretical and tactical contradictions now came to the surface. Differences concerning the usefulness of political passivity or the relationship to political Catholicism and the aristocracy finally led to an open rupture at the end of 1874. The radical wing seceded from the National Party as the National Liberal Party. The new party, led by Karel Sladkovsk§, considered itself a ‘national party,’ and adopted the old national program of the National Party, but intended to realize it on a strictly liberal basis. They rejected the National Party on the grounds that it was inconsistent in realizing liberal ideas while maintaining strong conservative inclinations. Due to the historical respect for some national leaders, such as Palack§, Rieger and others, and especially because of

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the highly undemocratic electoral system, the National Liberal Party had many difficulties developing and proving itself. Although it was popular among the urban and rural middle classes, in the 1870s and 1880s it could expect to obtain only about one-fifth of Czech votes and mandates during the parliamentary elections. The majority of the Czech electorate continued to support the liberal-conservative coalition for a long time to come. The situation remained the same in this respect even after the National Party radically changed its policies in the 1880s. The Young Czechs—the colloquial name for the supporters of the new National Liberal Party, as opposed to the Old Czechs, the supporters of the National Party—compromised and formed a coalition with the ruling National Party. For a decade they constituted the liberal opposition within this parliamentary coalition. They tried to counterbalance conservative pressure, but were still not strong enough to carve out a strong position for themselves as an independent party. History offered them an opportunity to do so only at the end of the 1880s, when the Czech– German conflicts were rising to a crescendo, the policies of the Old Czechs eventually collapsing in 1890. The victory of the National Liberal Party opened up new possibilities for them to realize their program. This was the first time the party had stepped out of its traditional role in opposition to become the ruling party. It now had to take most of the responsibility for changes in liberal policies. For a short period—at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s—the Young Czechs managed to unite all the opposition forces, except for the Social Democrats. This ‘unity’ was of course extremely complex, merging not only the Old Liberals and estranged members of the National Party, but also the extreme radical wing of the student intelligentsia and some politically moderate, realist scholars, including T. G. Masaryk. Considering the range of political commitments, it was somehow natural that there would be fierce debates within the party, and after a while ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ could be discerned; in 1893, one faction was pushed into the background, including Masaryk himself. In 1894–95 the National Liberal Party became a stable, consolidated bourgeois liberal party, purging itself of every trace of ‘evil radicalism.’ This was mainly the result of the activities of ex-realists such as Jozef Kaizl and Karel Kramárˇ. The consolidation of the Young Czechs was an indication of comprehensive changes within Czech politics, especially as far as party politics was concerned. For a number of theoretical (but mainly social and political) reasons, it was impossible to keep up the false image of ‘national unity.’ In the 1890s, large numbers of laborers poured into the Social Democrat Party, which gained a relatively strong position in a very short time. But there was a large block of non-worker and non-Socialist polit-

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ical groups within which political interests were becoming increasingly articulate and differentiated. Two main divisions were becoming more and more visible in Czech society: one between the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, and another between the urban and the rural entrepreneurs. As early as the 1880s, increasing industrialization and the crisis of small enterprises led to the development of a petty bourgeois political movement, which, when it tried to organize itself into an independent political party, relied on the fashionable ideas of ‘popular capitalism’ and anti-liberalism. In the 1890s more and more similar parties emerged in the Czech territories, most of them based on Christian Democrat or National Democrat principles. As far as the differences between the urban and industrial entrepreneurs and the agrarian entrepreneurs are concerned, the ideology of agrarianism began to take shape in the 1880s, although at first it was based on the feudal principle of estates and had nothing to do with liberalism. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century it had given rise to a strong agrarian party. Under these circumstances, the National Liberal Party had to fend for itself on a very wide front, assailed on all sides by anti-liberal parties and trends. Due to the existing parliamentary representative system, and the cautious behavior of some of its leaders, the National Party was able to preserve its ruling position and survive the ‘twilight of liberalism.’ The party, aware of its democratic traditions and the requirements of a changing world, gradually moved in the direction of liberal democracy. The leaders of the party knew that this step would lead to the loss of the party’s privileged position, but they had to move forward. In contrast to most of the new mass parties, which considered democracy only as a means of making themselves more popular and increasing their political influence, the Young Czech intellectuals took democratic principles seriously, and emphasized the liberal basis of modern democracy. Unlike Masaryk, who was searching for the roots of Czech democracy, the Young Czechs did not want to ignore the legacy of liberalism. They truly believed that the principles of liberalism had not been exploited fully, and that there were still many possibilities and potential avenues to explore. As far as the National Liberal Party’s tactics towards the Austrian government were concerned, they were a democratized and updated version of the policies of the National Party from 1880. The long-term aim of an independent Czech nation-state was still, if not at the forefront of their political minds, nevertheless present, and occasionally raised, as at the opening session of the new Imperial Council. In the practice of everyday politics the attitude of the Young Czechs did not change in this respect, but, in contrast to the Old Czechs, they did not restrict their activities to legislation (and even their legislative activities

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did not follow particularly rigid and compulsory principles). They pursued deliberately independent politics, which operated on a very large scale, ranging from occasional and indirect support of the government to open opposition or even direct obstruction. In addition to their legislative activity, they also paid much attention to the executive and judicial systems, and tried to attain key positions in both, in order to be able to influence the work of the Austrian state machinery from the inside. In so doing they hoped to change Czech economic, cultural, and political life in a positive way. This ‘positive’ politics, based on the principle of gradual development, was effective and brought a number of beneficial changes to Czech society. The National Liberal Party persisted with this type of politics even after 1907, when it lost its dominant position. In 1907 the old parliamentary system was finally reformed and a system of equal and general elections for the Imperial Council was introduced. As a result, the National Liberal Party became only the third strongest party behind the Social Democrats and the Agrarian Party in the Imperial Council. Nevertheless, it managed to keep its strong position in the Bohemian provincial assembly and in the lower representative bodies, in the district and village assemblies, where reforms were not introduced. As social and political differentiation was becoming stronger in the Czech territories, the liberals could obviously not claim to represent the interests of the entire nation. Their program of emancipation, however, was still the core component of every national aspiration. The most important Czech political parties, including the Social Democrats, regarded the Habsburg Empire as a constant political factor. Despite all their differences in respect of ambitions and goals, they all envisaged the future of Czech society within the framework of the existing state formation. Only one relatively important but peripheral radical trend had an implicit antiHabsburg program, the realization of which would have implied a total break with the Habsburg Empire; this not necessarily and not always republican program was represented by the radically nationalist Czech intelligentsia, which was indirectly linked to the program of J. V. Fri∑, a well-known Czech intellectual exile. At the beginning of the 1860s, they worked out an anti-Habsburg program with a number of other exiled Polish and Hungarian politicians and intellectuals. It was only in 1914 and during the First World War that the situation changed, leading to a gradual transformation of Czech politics. During the first two years of the war, Czech politics within the Monarchy virtually ground to a halt. At the same time, the Czech politicians in exile had to be careful about how they developed the pre-war program of national emancipation and independence. It was only after the fall of the Tsarist regime and the end of the war that the Czech liberal and

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Social Democratic forces had an opportunity to cooperate. In 1918, as a result of their joint efforts, and amidst tremendous social and state political changes in Europe, the state of the Czechs together with the Slovaks came to light.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bene≥, Edvard. 1908. Le problème autrichien et la question tchéque. Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière. ∂apek, Karel. 1938. Masaryk on Thought and Life. New York: no publisher. Cohen, Gary B. 1981. The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861– 1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Denis, Ernest. 1903. La Bohéme depuis la Montagne Blanche. 2 vol. Paris: E. Leroux. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1997. Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Grégr, Eduard. 1908–1914. Denník (Diary), ed. Z. Tobolka, 2 vol. Prague: ∂esky ∑tena‡. Hasslinger, Hugo. 1928. Die Entwicklung des tschechischen Nationalbewusstseins. Kassel: J. Stauda. Havlí∑ek, Karel. 1900–1903. Politické spisy (Political papers), ed. Z. Tobolka, 3 vol. Prague: Jan Laichter. Heidler, Jozef. 1913. Dr. Adolf Maria Pinkas a vznik ∑eského programu v letech 1848– 1850 a 1861 (Dr. Adolf Maria Pinkas and the Czech political programme 1848–1850 and 1861). Vestník král. ∑eské spole∑nosti nauk, trˇída filozofická, 24.ff. ———. 1914. ∂eské politické strany (Czech political parties). Prague: Jos. Vilímek. Heiszler, Vilmos. Austroslavismus—Austrohungarismus. (Die Aufnahme der tschechischen föderalistischen Bestrebungen in Pesth 1860–1861). Annales Universitatis Budapestinensis, Sectio historica 1985, pp. 23–48. Hol§, Ladislav. 1996. The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation. National Identity and the Post-Communist Social Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kazbunda, Karel. Národní program ∑esk§ r. 1860 (The Czech national programme, 1860), ∂esk§ ∂asopis Historick§ 1927, pp. 473–547. Mann, Stuart E. 1961. Karel Havlicek, a Slav Pragmatist. Slavonic and East European Review, pp. 413–422. Masaryk, Toma≥ Garrigue. 1899. Palack§s Idee des böhmischen Volkes. Prague: J. U. C. ∏alud. Matousek, J. 1928. Úsilí o ∑esk§ deník 1860 (Efforts for a Czech daily 1860). ∂eská Revue, pp. 30–35, 80–84. Namier, Lewis B. 1944. 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals. London: G. Cumberlege. Palack§, Frantisek. 1874. Gedenkblätter. Prague: F. Tempsky. Pech, Stanley Z. 1957. F. L. Rieger, the Road from Liberalism to Conservatism. Journal of Central European Affairs, pp. 3–23.

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———. 1969. The Czech Revolution of 1848. Chapel Hill: University of North Carlina Press. Plener, Eduard. 1911–1921. Erinnerungen. 3 Bde. Stuttgart–Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstadt. Rieger, Franti≥ek Ladislav. 1913. Politické vyroky a zásady (Political statements and principles). ed. J. Langner, Prague: J. Otto. Roubík, Franti≥ek. 1948. ∂esk§ rok 1848 (Czech 1848). Prague: Ladislav Kundr. Sabina, Karel. 1937. Vzpominky (Memorials). ed. M. Hysek, Prague: Fr. Borov§. Seton-Watson, R.W.1943. A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London: Hutchinson. Tobolka, Zden±k. 1932–1937. Politické d±jiny ∑eskoslovenského národa od r. 1848 (Political history of the Czechoslovak nation from 1848), 5 vol. Prague: ∂eskoslovensk§ Kompas. Urban, Otto. 1982. ∂eská spole∑nost: 1848–1918. Prague: Svoboda. ———. 1995. One hundred years of the Czech question. A historian’s account. Czech Sociological Review, 3/1995, pp. 21–31. Zeithammer, Anton. 1912. Zur Geschichte der böhmischen Ausgleichsversuche 1865– 1871. Prague: own publication.

III. Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Southern Europe

The Inherent Burden of Russian Liberalism MIKLÓS KUN

I. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a great number of liberal Russian politicians and thinkers—Struve, Milyukov, Maklakov, Shipov, Petrunkevitch, and Prince Trubetskoy— published their writings in Russia and abroad. Although all these authors considered themselves liberals, they often disagreed on important issues. For example, Pavel Milyukov, an authority on the history of economics and civilization, who later became foreign minister of the 1917 Provisional government, considered the Western type of constitutional republic to be the via regia for Russia. Pyotr Struve, a militant ex–social democrat who, before completely leaving Marxist ideas behind, composed the manifesto for the nascent Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party after it held its first congress in 1898, endeavored to build specifically Russian elements into the liberal program. But however different their ideas may have been, they all agreed on one thing: they all looked to their predecessors, the early nineteenth-century Russian ‘liberals,’ to provide the foundations for their philosophical, moral, and ethical views. Although this idea of using and developing their predecessors’ ideas would have been very anachronistic anywhere else in Europe, it was quite appropriate in Russia, even at the end of the last century. The reason these sophisticated theories were still up to date was very simple: previous efforts dating from the first third of the nineteenth century, to put all these theories into practice, had failed and been aborted. If social transformation was to be accomplished in the way it had been designed, a beginning had to be made from the point at which their predecessors had ground to a halt (Leontovich, 1980). The early and later phases of Russian liberalism had even more in common. Liberal politicians and thinkers of both periods rejected not only the ‘Tartar–Byzantine’ type of autocracy, but also Western European radicalism. The Decembrists of the 1820s developed their liberal ideas not only to oppose the Byzantine scepter, the Tartar knout, and the German drill, but also to oppose the Jacobin tendencies of the French Revolution. It is no accident that the book which had the greatest impact on this group at the time was Benjamin Constant’s De l’esprit

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de conquète et de l’usurpation, which encouraged thorough criticism of “unlimited despotism in the name of the nation” (Landa, 1975). The Jacobin type of dictatorship, the policy of the “strong hand,” was based upon the right of the majority to achieve its objectives by any means. At this time—and even in forthcoming decades—this type of dictatorship was not an inherent part of Russian politics. Under the reigns of Catherine II and Paul I, the liberals and those who had preceded them had experienced an almost ‘medieval’ type of despotism. This was the main raison they excluded even the theoretical possibility of a system which might use autocratic means, even in the name of liberty (Leontovich, 1980, p. 63). It is no accident that in the first three decades of the century the most often repeated slogan among the Russian liberals was Madame de Staël’s interpretation of Rousseau: “Even the liberty of a whole nation is not worth the life of a single person.” The most characteristic and also the most tragic aspect of Russian liberalism was that, in parallel with the opposition movement of the noble intelligentsia, there was a similar tendency, motivated by similar reasons, within the administration itself. When Alexander I came to the throne in 1801, he turned to his ex-tutor, the Swiss La Harpe, for advice on how to reform the political structure of Russia. La Harpe had been one of the leading politicians in Switzerland and was able to outline an ambitious program for the emperor to reform the state in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The emperor then commissioned Rosenkampf, secretary of the legislative assembly, to draft the statutes of the Russian Empire, the first version of which was completed by 1804. Although the text mentioned many important principles—for example, the inviolability of the individual and of private property, the freedom of private initiatives, and the separation of state and imperial property—it did not touch upon political rights (Leontovich, 1980, p. 54). Nevertheless, this draft proved to be unacceptable even in the absence of references to political rights. When in 1807, after several abortive attempts to reform the mechanism of the state, Mikhail Speransky—the first and for another century only statesman in Russia who did not have noble rank—started to work on a comprehensive reform program, the liberals had more reason than ever to hope. After working on the program for five years, he was in a position to draft the outline of a new constitution in which he made plans for the abolition of serfdom, and elaborated numerous other reforms with a view to establishing the appropriate framework of a liberal bourgeois society. His plans were based mostly on Western European liberal ideas, but they tried to take Russian reality into account at every point. These ideas included the assurance of legality, the democratic process, and the accountability of the civil service, the constitutional restriction of despotism, and the guarantee of an independent judiciary. “The laws are supposed to be made for the

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benefit and security of the people they refer to,” said Speransky, and he declared this to be a natural right. In his view, the inviolability of the individual and of property is the essence of human rights. But human rights can be assured only if two important principles are maintained by the legal system: (i) no one can be punished without legal proceedings, and (ii) individuals can be compelled to perform a particular action only by the force of law. But Speransky did not stop there. He wanted to protect the freedom and property of the individual, not only from the arbitrariness of the executive power, but also from that of the legislative power. In addition, applying the principle of stability, he wanted to subordinate the legislative power of the government to “existing law” (Leontovich, 1980, pp. 67–73). Speransky’s comprehensive and extremely complicated reform program was implemented relatively quickly. On 1 January 1810 the State Council was established, designed to be the Upper House of a twochamber Parliament. The Lower House of this Parliament, the State Duma, was to be phased in over the following months. The State Duma was to be the elective assembly. However, Speransky fell out of favor with Alexander I, and this part of the program fell by the wayside, only to be revived some ninety-five years later, in 1905. Because of the imminent danger of French attack, the Tsar endeavored to maneuver between the different social forces in order to maintain the unity of the empire. Since Speransky was not very popular with the nobility anyway, his obvious French leanings simply added to their hostility: many nobles accused him of spying for Napoleon. As a result, the fallen minister was exiled, and although some years later he was permitted to return to St Petersburg and re-enter state service—when Tsar Nicholas I raised him to noble rank of count and drew him into the work of the legislative committee—he never regained his previous power and influence (Speransky, 1862, p. 34).

II. In the final analysis, Speransky’s ambitious plans failed, partly because he was completely rootless in a Russian society in which the machinery of autocracy and bureaucracy worked so smoothly and relentlessly, and partly because he prepared his plans entirely in secret. This was by no means necessary, despite the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the infrastructure of publicity was not well developed in Russia. After Alexander I came to the throne it was not impossible to discuss designs concerning the improvement of the state. The Tsar himself, for instance, gave orders to translate the works of the French Encyclopedists and to publish the correspondence between his grandmother, Catherine II, and Voltaire—even an excellent two-volume selection of

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Bentham’s writings was published during his reign.1 Another good example which shows how far it was possible to express oneself at that time was the fact that Bentham’s pupil, Admiral Mordvinov (who spent quite a long time in England), played an active and major political role in the work of the State Council. Mordvinov in many respects had a role in Russian political life similar to that of Károly Eötvös in Hungary. It is true that he thought the abolition of serfdom could not be introduced in Russia at that time, but in all other respects—unlike his ally Speransky, who was considered to be a follower of the ‘French pattern’—he was an ardent advocate of the English type of liberalism in St. Petersburg (Ikonnikov, 1873). In addition to English and French ideology, there was another type of liberalism in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This third, reforms from above ‘German’ type of liberalism emerged in Russia at the top of the state administration during the Napoleonic wars. It was especially popular with some of the advisers of the Tsar. As this type of liberalism followed the ideas of Count Stein, but in the second half of the 1810s Russian models were sought with a view to supporting the national version of liberalism. The ideas of this group gradually developed firmer roots and attracted more and more coverage in the press. This nourished considerable hope at the time, although this was to wane later. Numerous significant articles were published within a very short time: Kunyitsin, for example—principal of the lycée which Pushkin attended and well-known in Russia as the author of a book entitled On Natural Right—published an article on the constitution which caused a real sensation among liberals at the time. Another fundamental essay was meant to be a pure statistical study, but its author Arsenyev, tutor of Alexander II—who later abolished serfdom in Russia—took the opportunity ‘casually’ to mention a number of arguments, all of which endeavored to prove the vital significance of private enterprise (Landa, 1975, pp. 103, 107, 147; Druzhinin, 1985, pp. 37–38). This trend found many followers among the ruling classes, not to mention the Tsar. The period between 1817 and 1820 or 1821 (opinions vary on the exact dates) is often mentioned as the second ‘liberal’ phase of Alexander I’s reign. This sudden change in sentiment was motivated by current foreign affairs, as is so often the case in Russian history, although this time the direction of liberal sentiment was different. Usually, ‘liberal’ sympathies developed after shameful military defeats, while conservative feelings tended to be at their strongest when the Russians had achieved signifi-

1

On Bentham’s influence on contemporary Russian authors, see Druzhinin, 1985, 37, 38, 64, 108, 252, and 318.

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cant military victories. This time, strangely enough, both liberal and conservative sentiment was strong. As a result, both tried to hinder and neutralize the other. They followed this policy so successfully that after a while they completely extinguished each other’s strength. During Napoleon’s campaign in Russia the landowning aristocracy became extremely strong. They were ready to do everything to defeat the French. They organized a popular army, and succeeded in having Kutuzov appointed once again as its commander. During the war, the aristocracy, after great sacrifices, managed to achieve its final objective: the system of serfdom, the economic basis of their existence, survived. Nevertheless, the liberals were not completely defeated. Alexander I celebrated Russia’s victory, worthy of the “Tsar of all Tsars” as Pushkin called him; his procession to Paris was astounding. At the same time, he did not forget about his pledge to his ex-tutor, La Harpe, to introduce radical reforms in Russia. At the Vienna Congress he promised to assure constitutional rights to all. La Harpe had such a great influence on Alexander I that the Tsar always, even on his deathbed, in the middle of his depressive fits, remembered his tutor’s advice. During Speransky’s enforced absence, the Tsar commissioned his early friend and confidant, Nikolai Novosiltsev, the ill-famed, ruthless pro-consul of Poland, to design a liberal constitution for Russia (Lotman, 1960, pp. 56–58). The draft was almost an archetypal product of the region, and accurately reflected Novosiltsev’s range of experiences, from the Polish constitution to the liberal dreams of his youth, which he shared with Tsar Alexander I in the court of Tsarina Catherine, where such dreams were always well received. The preamble of the draft constitution was actually a reproduction of the thoughts of Benjamin Constant. The Tsar had ordered Russian diplomats in Paris to contact Constant some years before. The text was basically composed by Destampe, one of the most experienced and well-trained experts in constitutional law in France. The Russian translation was made by a liberal prince, Pyotr Vyazemsky, who was a friend of Pushkin and the Decembrists. The main objectives of the new constitution were to assure individual human rights, introduce a representative and more decentralized system, and strengthen local autonomy all over Russia (Landa, 1975, pp. 28–40). Novosiltsev endeavored to ‘adapt’ all these ideas to Russian circumstances. This meant that his draft of the constitution eventually strayed further and further from the French administrative model, the Code Civil. He planned to divide Russia into twelve municipalities, or states, with Nizhny Novgorod as the capital. According to his plans, the country would have been led by a two-chamber parliament (Sejm), with an Upper and a Lower House. The seats in the Upper House would have been inherited, and those in the Lower House would have been won on the basis of election. Serfs would not have had the right either to vote or to

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be elected. They would have been treated like private property in a society in which the principle of private property was henceforth to be considered sacred and inviolable. Instead of the sovereignty of the people or the nation, the draft declared the sovereignty of the ruler, who was to be the sole source of all power. This is the point at which the ideas of the pro-English Prince Vyazemsky ceased to have an influence on Novosiltsev’s plans, his place being taken by the most brilliant ideologist of autocracy, the court historian Karamzin. It was well known all over Russia that Alexander I was going to introduce the new constitution in the near future. He made clear reference to this in his closing speech at the February 1818 session of the Sejm.2 But the draft constitution drawn up by Novosiltsev and Vyazemsky had only a very small audience within Russia. Only a very restricted number of aristocrats read it when in 1819 they were officially asked to write their opinion on it. The aristocrats found the draft scandalous and unanimously rejected it. Consequently, no matter how close the liberals and their ideas got to the Tsar, all their attempts to reform the system remained futile. They did not have the power to control the situation, and there was no real social force behind them. What is more, even the different liberal groups were not united, nor did they know much about each other. A good example of this lack of communication was a pamphlet written by an anonymous group calling themselves “a small circle of sober and moderate liberals,” who argued for the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of free enterprise within the framework of a “restricted monarchy” (Druzhinin, 1985, p. 43). The representatives of this kind of liberalism were motivated not so much by political goals as by economic necessities: their estates had started to produce a surplus, which required a more capitalistic system.

III. Alexander I, who could never forget the fact that his father, Paul I, had been assassinated—with his consent—by dissatisfied aristocrats, gave up his plans when he saw the opposition of the nobles. Subsequently, the draft never became a matter for further discussion during his reign. It was only in 1831, during the national uprising in Warsaw, that the unabridged text of the constitution was first published. Nevertheless, through Vyazemsky, the principles of the constitution and even the text itself became known among the opposition, especially in the newly formed Decembrist societies. No doubt these people were very much

2

Part of Alexander I’s speech was published in Vyazemsky’s translation in Sevemaya potsta (1818), 26. This fact is not mentioned in the literature.

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attracted to liberal ideas, but most of them did not approve of this constitutional draft, even to the point of being outright hostile to it. They claimed that a constitution in this form, by giving even more power to the ruler, would only conserve the system of serfdom and autocracy. They undoubtedly had another reason to disapprove: according to the new constitution Russia would hand over several of its Western provinces to the Polish Kingdom, and Poland and Finland would have been declared autonomous. Having just defeated Napoleon, the whole nation was flushed with victory, and for most Russians, even amongst the opposition, these steps were incomprehensible and offensive to their national feelings. The Decembrists were so indignant when they learned about the Tsar’s intention to give up some Lithuanian provinces that they made serious plans to assassinate him. Looking back, it is difficult to understand this chauvinistic feature of Russian liberalism, but if we examine the facts at the beginning of the nineteenth century we may comprehend better. At that time, Russia was a country which was beginning to realize its potential and the possibilities of social change. Consequently, many thinkers and politicians considered liberalism more than a mere ideology that would help Russia to achieve radical social change and to keep up with the more developed Western societies. Liberalism in Russia had also become a justification of expansion. Little has been written about this, but it is a telling fact that even most of the Decembrists were convinced that, in the name of social progress, the Russian Empire had the right to increase her territories by annexing less developed neighboring countries. Sometimes the Decembrists made such extreme demands that they exceeded even the greediness of the official foreign policy, which, since the time of Peter the Great, had consciously and continuously tried to expand in all directions. Nikolai Muravyov’s imaginary confederate empire, for example, was bigger than the reality of Alexander I’s empire. Muravyov included territories in Central Asia which had not yet been conquered. In one of the imaginary maps which was drawn up, even Constantinople belonged to the Russian Empire (ibid., pp. 151–52). The United Slavic Society, which was actually a Freemasons’ lodge and represented the plebeian wing of the movement, also considered the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and almost the whole territory of the Habsburg Monarchy (including Hungary) as part of a Russian-dominated Slavic confederation.3 Pavel Pestel’s conceptions in foreign policy were even more aggressive. This most characteristic representative of Decembrism combined all the extremities of his move-

3

For more details see Netskina, 1927; Oksman, 1955, 154–58; and Dekabristi na Ukraini, Zb. 1–2.

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ment. The relentlessness of Jacobinism and the uncontrollable hatred of the aristocracy were just as much part of his philosophy as the belief that the nomad tribes of Asia had to be controlled and assimilated and that the Jews had to be deported back to Palestine.4 As far as foreign policy was concerned, the official or ‘court’ version of liberalism was not very different from the liberalism of the Decembrists, whether they aired their ideas in Masonic lodges among friends or occasionally in progressive papers. Nevertheless, although the two trends had many similar or even identical features, they remained fundamentally separate. They developed their own ways, completely ignoring the real enemy, shadowboxing with an imaginary opponent. The Decembrists were completely dissatisfied with political power, but they suppressed their anger and did not avow their views openly for years. What is more, many of them worked for the government, loyally and dutifully serving the bureaucratic or military machinery of the autocratic state they hated so much. The official version of liberalism behaved in the same fashion. Alexander I had known about the Decembrist movement for a long time, and by 1821 he was aware of all the details of the plot organized by the Decembrists in the army and the court, but he hesitated to make any drastic countermove. Although he dissolved the Masonic lodges,5 and made career promotions more difficult for the Decembrist officers in the army, he did not resort to force—perhaps he was afraid that he might meet the same fate as his father, or simply considered the plot a controversy within the power system that should not be given any publicity. However, this incident was by no means unique at the time: it was an age of plots and military coups. There were armed revolts in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Poland. Even Russia became involved in a war of independence when the Tsar promised to help the Greek freedom fighters and Ypsilanti’s movement. In the end, Alexander did not keep his promise, which proved to be a political mistake with serious consequences for domestic policy: the Decembrists, who were spellbound by the mere thought of liberty, became more radical as a result of their failure and disappointment. As we can see, political power in Russia—even in this relatively progressive period—conspired to do its best to alienate the most constructive elements of the nobility, who in many respects shared its views and aims. This forced the opposition to concentrate on the differences instead of the similarities between them: all their energy was wasted on futile efforts to perfect the means of opposition and in the meantime their

4 5

On the origin of this conception see Pavlov-Silvansky, 1919. About the fertile relationship between Russian Freemasonry and the liberal movement see Bakounine, 1940; and Buryshkin, 1967.

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positive attitude and constructive imagination became weaker and weaker. This alienation of the progressive elements within the nobility seems even more peculiar if we consider that before 1821 neither of the parties would have needed to give up their principles—or very few—in order to find a reasonable compromise. A good example of the two parties’ similarity, which would have allowed them to find common ground, is their visions of the future. The Decembrist thoughts were laid out in a document produced by Nikolai Turgenev. Turgenev—the ‘Russian Baron Stein,’ as his contemporaries often called him—was one of the main ideologists of the Decembrists. His document on the changes necessary in the state machinery was ready just a year before Novosiltsev’s program. “In Russia every initiative must come from the government and not from below,” Turgenev wrote. “If the government does not do anything, we shall have to wait until time solves our problems” (Arhiv bratyev Turgenivih, 1913, p. 302). In 1816 he suggested that “in return” for the emancipation of the serfs, the landed gentry should be compensated by being given all the bourgeois civil and human rights—a proposal that Alexander I, as a good pupil of La Harpe, might have made twenty years before. In this early period of Russian liberalism both the powers that be and the opposition remained within the framework of paternalism. Nikolai Turgenev’s brother, the more radical Sergei, who died young, was a rare exception. They say the people have nothing to do with the constitution … This is only possible because the people are not accustomed to thinking about important issues. This does not mean it is not much more advantageous for them to have a good constitution than a bad one. A fair constitution is just as much necessary for the welfare of the people as for the welfare of those who think of it. And I have another doubt. I really wonder whether it is an ultimate and unquestionable necessity that the needs and demands of the people have always to be met? The people should never defy the constitution; if they do, they only have to be enlightened and informed about their real interests and they will not resist any more. The people are reasonable enough to accept arguments and knowledge, information and common sense.You do not have to conquer the people, it is enough to enlighten them. (Arhiv bratyev Turgenivih, 1913, p. 25; cf. Landa, 1975, pp. 43–44) This was one of the versions of liberalism the Decembrists professed. This group truly believed in peaceful means and objectives. They proposed the introduction of a public elementary school system because

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they considered education and enlightenment to be the most effective method of changing society. They sought to make the work of the judicial system more efficient, and fought for the elimination of corruption within the state apparatus. Some of them tried to set an example and clearly demonstrated how a true member of the opposition should behave against the government. A few of them were even ready to make sacrifices. Ivan Pushtsin, Pushkin’s best friend, for instance, just to prove that the service of progress was possible and necessary in the state apparatus itself, sacrificed his magnificent career and accepted a relatively low-paying job as a judge. But most members of the Union of Salvation, a Decembrist society, did not agree with him. Following the traditions of the eighteenth-century Russian nobility and military aristocracy, they rejected the Western European type of liberalism. Most were convinced that the only way to achieve a constitutional monarchy was a coup d’état. In the other Decembrist societies established later, there were elements who professed less radical ideas on specific questions than some of the conservative members of the government. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the political situation in Russia was extremely complicated and full of controversy. A good example of this was General Arakcheyev, the creator of a system of military–agricultural colonies, who was considered to be a particularly aggressive and narrowminded person and the embodiment of despotism. Yet he also developed a plan for gradually emancipating all Russian serfs. He intended to allot a piece of land to the serfs, hoping that this move would provide stability and security to the landowning nobility. His ideas were by no means original, being servile imitations of the emperor’s intentions. One faction of the Decembrists was less radical on this issue, however; they thought that the whole territory of the country was the inalienable property of the Russian nobility. On the other hand, most Decembrists, unlike Arakcheyev, Prince Menshikov, and other conservative politicians, wanted to grant civil rights as well as personal freedom for the emancipated serfs (Druzhinin, 1985, pp. 32–33).

IV. The difference between the ‘official’ and the ‘opposition’ versions of liberalism was not always conspicuous. The fact that most liberals, after going through a German and a French period, became pro-English made it even more blurred. Generally, liberals on both sides of the barricade designed social and political improvements in Russia according to English patterns. Copying the English model was not completely new in Russia. Even at the of the eighteenth century, during the reign of Tsarina Catherine and Tsar Paul , the top of the aristocracy was enthusiastically pro-English. Some of the most educated and influential

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representatives of the aristocracy—for example, the Vorontsov brothers, who lived in England for years, Admiral Mordvinov, a member of the State Council, and Prince Czartoryski—were ardent supporters and proliferators of English ideas. (This pro-English attitude became somewhat weaker in Russia after the Napoleonic wars, a tendency which increasing social contradictions within England made even stronger. [See Landa, 1975, pp. 109–12].) All probably shared the views of Nikolai Turgenev, who claimed that “not only have the English people almost reached the maximum of bourgeois welfare, but they also showed the way ahead for all the other nations.” Turgenev made a similar statement in the draft manifesto of a literary society ‘Arzamas’: “England made Europe love freedom, France made her hate it. At the same time, we cannot deny the fact that the French revolution gave a very good lesson to Europe on how to govern the state” (Turgenev, 1936, p. 239; Landa, 1975, p. 111). There were two important periods in Russian history when this proEnglish attitude proved to be influential, both in particular government circles and among a group of intellectuals. It was these intellectuals who later became known as Decembrists. Following the assassination of Paul I at the beginning of the nineteenth century, English political philosophies were extremely popular in fashionable Russian salons. The second time the nobility took counsel with English political thinkers was after the Napoleonic wars. In the second half of the 1810s, the English Liberals were increasingly concerned with the principles of equality before the law and free enterprise. These ideas somehow became less attractive in England during the years of economic crisis. This economic crisis also affected the Russian spirit, since there were so many intellectual ties with England. At the end of the 1810s, there was another serious attack on pro-English thought in Russia. The press was writing more and more about an imminent English revolution, which, these articles suggested, would be even crueler and bloodier than the French Revolution. The Russians became even more skeptical about English liberal reforms when they learnt that in 1817 the Parliament, accepting the proposal of the Tory government, canceled the Habeas Corpus Act. This act was designed to grant the individual the inviolability of the citizen. “The plutocracy in England,” wrote Pavel Pestel in an analysis which approached the English situation in a completely new way, “has proudly raised its head, leant on its huge heaps of gold and reduced the lower classes to destitution, thus creating new problems and fatal disasters for the world” (Vostanye dekabristov, 1958, p. 298). Irrespective of the origin of different liberal ideas, progressive Russian thinkers and politicians were well aware of the difficulties of adapting these ideas to their own Russian circumstances—most could not be used directly, if at all. Very few Decembrists thought in the same way as

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Nikolai Muravyov. He claimed that with the implementation of a new constitution and several other laws Russia would be able to catch up with the West in a few years. Most of the Decembrists expected such a process to take a lot longer. According to Pavel Pestel and Nikolai Turgenev, for example, Russia would need ten or even twenty-five years to achieve improvement. But Pestel’s and Turgenev’s ideas were very different in every other respect. Pestel was convinced that only a military dictatorship could guarantee the order necessary for the implementation of reforms in Russia. Turgenev, on the other hand, trusted rationality more than aggression. Nevertheless, even he admitted that in Russia it was impossible to introduce economic and social reforms at the same time. According to Turgenev, the first five years of the reform program would need to be devoted to legislation and the reformation of the state. The other major task in the first five years would be a total revision of the government’s financial policy. It required the deficit to be cut and the necessary funds created to ensure the implementation of further reforms. New laws would be tentatively enacted in the second five years. These would have made it possible to draw particular conclusions and to modify imperfect laws. Turgenev suggested that landowners who were ready to emancipate their serfs without being compelled to do so be given a special title. Although as pairs they would not have been automatically members of the Upper House, this title would have meant some improvement in their social status. According to Turgenev’s plans it would have been only in the fourth five-year stage that the gradual and careful process of emancipating the serfs could have started with the help of landowners who were ready to cooperate. Strangely enough, during this period of twenty years the system of autocracy would have remained untouched: the two branches of the Parliament would take power in Russia only at the end of the twentyfifth year. In many respects, Turgenev’s conception, which basically planned a reform from above, was close to Speransky’s plans. At the same time, if we compare his program to those of Novosiltsev and Vyazemsky, we must admit that it was much more moderate (Landa, 1975, pp. 85–93).6 Finally, we have to ask a very modern and logical question: is it possible that liberalism did not have any natural roots in Russia? Is it possible that this is the very reason why over the past few decades the term ‘liberal’ has been a somewhat derogatory and sometimes even offensive adjective, not only in the political daily press, but also in the most serious and ‘abstract’ of scholarly analyses?

6

Cf. Semevsky, 1909.

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At the beginning of the nineteenth century the situation was certainly very different. In the course of an ardent fight for national unity and a constitutional state, the intelligentsia became increasingly conscious of its national identity. Instead of emphasizing the order or class they belonged to, its members started to put more and more stress on national feelings and consciousness. Although the Russian liberals of the time studied the American Constitution, the French Code, and the English state system with the same thoroughness, they never forgot their own roots. “First of all,” wrote Nikolai Orlov, Pushkin’s paternal friend, to Prince Sergey Volkonsky, one of the most renowned Decembrists, “every Russian has to be a Russian, in every sense of the word. The idea of a nation has to be the guiding principle in all our deeds. Everybody has to devote all his efforts, success and hope to this notion” (Orlov, 1963, p. 280). These patriotic feelings surfaced in the actions and thoughts of numerous contemporaries. Speransky’s and Novosiltsev’s plans are full of archaic Slavic expressions, religious terms, and allegories from the history of the Rus’ of Novgorod and Kiev, as indeed are the political pamphlets of Nikolai Turgenev and Pavel Pestel. Pavel Pestel’s main work, for example, was entitled Russkaya Pravda (‘Russian Truth,’ 1824) because that was the name of the ancient law of Kievan Rus.’ Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, who organized and led the 29 December rebellion of the Chernigov regiment in 1825 and the Ukrainian Decembrists’ rebellion in January 1826, published his political pamphlet under the title ‘Pravoslav Catechism.’ In addition, the cult of the ancient Novgorod Republic was a crucial element in the poems of Ryleyev and Pushkin. This was not purely a patriotic gesture, however, but a sign of nostalgia for an abortive attempt in Russian history to belong to Europe, and for a time when pursuit of the European way of development seemed realistic. By the end of 1820, the Decembrists had become completely disillusioned and disappointed by Alexander I’s reform policy. More and more Decembrists were attracted by the idea of a republic. This tendency was not without precedent in Russian history (for example, the town assembly or Veche of Novgorod). From this time on, the movement became increasingly radical, and although this period did not last long, it left an enduring mark on the later development of Russian liberalism. This was the time when Nikolai Turgenev made the famous and later much quoted remark at a debate of monarchists and republicans: “Le président—sans phrases!” We have to bear in mind that— with the possible exception of Sergei Volkonsky—Turgenev was the only ‘liberal’ representative of the opposition who, not long before this, had been a close associate of the emperor. Turgenev, that unimpeach-

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able, morally strict person, became so disappointed with the authorities that, even when Alexander II granted him a pardon from a death sentence and returned all his property, he still refused to return to Russia. Although in 1824 it was extremely difficult for him to leave the country and live far away from his beloved Russia, he chose to stay in exile until 1870 (Tarasov, 1923, p. 197). By the end of 1820, the Decembrists, under the influence of the best known progressive thinkers in Western Europe, started to question the structure of the state system. They were relatively united in this, irrespective of their political commitments. The question was raised, however, whether, after the introduction of the constitution, the form of the political system should be a republic or a constitutional monarchy. The question was answered by public sentiment. The Romanovs had such widespread popularity with the masses, the Tsarist monarchy was so deeply rooted in Russian traditions, and there were so many illusions about the imperial family that the introduction of even the most moderate form of democratic government would encounter extreme difficulties. The proposals to solve this problem were numerous and exceptionally wide-ranging, encompassing the notion of enthroning a relatively powerless Romanov from the collateral line of descent and a plot to extinguish the whole Romanov dynasty. The danger that the old political regime might re-establish itself made even the most educated and liberal elements within the reform movement approve of resorting to autocratic means. Similarly, the Decembrists’ ideas about the future of the country were varied and often contradictory. Pavel Pestel, for example, referring to the history of the Napoleonic dictatorship, often made it clear that the army would play a predominant role in the life of the country after the subversion of the Romanov dynasty. The army would be of vital importance for a long time afterwards, to help prevent the restoration of the old regime. In addition, a consistent and disciplined introduction of a modern state system would put too great a burden on the people, especially at the beginning. The radical author of Russian Truth supposed that most democratic concepts—such as freedom of speech or decentralization of the administration—could be introduced only after the conservative elements had suffered a decisive defeat in Russia, the international position of the country had stabilized, and the first political and economic results of the emancipation of the serfs were felt. These concepts were much more pragmatic than theoretical. They considered all the possible obstacles that might slow the process of development and took all the real social and political circumstances in Russia into consideration—these were the very same as those which years earlier had doomed Alexander I’s reform plans to failure. On the other hand, Pestel, despite his friends’ critical comments and persuasion, failed to

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accept that a dictatorship, even if it claimed to be revolutionary and to represent the people, could never be justified. He never accepted the argument that nothing, not even liberty, could justify aggression. He denied that the kind of powerful state he idealized would offend the individual and restrict personal freedom. Nikolai Muravyov had a very different view of the future of Russia. His ideas, laid out in his unfinished French-language publication Curious Conversations, represented the typical attitude of the Russian landed gentry. Muravyov was one of the richest aristocrats in the country, and he became the most important ideologist of the moderate wing of the Decembrists. Just before the breakout of the Decembrist insurrection, he retired to his country estate as a gesture of protest against the fact that the radical elements had taken the upper hand within the movement. Muravyov asserted that Russia must not follow the French example of nationalizing the land after the revolution. Instead, he affirmed that the state should sell the land owned by those who had fled abroad before the revolution and retain the proceeds for them until their return. He imagined the future Russian system mirroring the English one, with a cheap, decentralized apparatus. He was convinced that “the lower the taxes citizens pay, the more advantageous it is for the state.” Strange as it may sound, his reasoning was not illogical: the more money people can put into enterprise, the more active and well-balanced they will be, and the more they will keep away from politics and affairs of state.

V. The most active and fertile period of the ‘liberals’ in Russia was the beginning of the 1820s. At this time society was full of bustling debates concerning various ideal forms of government. This period of highly active theoretical and ideological activity was, however, followed by a long lull. There were several reasons for this. One, although by no means the most important, was a one-off confrontation between the powers that be and the opposition; another was that the liberals had to go underground because the authorities were becoming increasingly conservative. It was not because of the Senate Square event on 14 December 1825 nor the insurrection of the Chernigov regiment that this first period of liberalism tailed off in Russia. In many respects the game had already been lost, partly because many leaders of the Decembrist movement, preparing for a form of military coup to gain power, had become more radical. Between 1823 and 1824 many members of the Northern and Southern Societies of the Decembrists, who had previously been against Jacobinism and any other form of radicalism, accepted the idea of a military dictatorship, and enthusiastically supported the forthcoming social revolution. In 1823, when Ryleyev, Prince Narishkin, the Podgio

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brothers, and other members of the Northern Society discussed Nikolai Muravyov’s draft constitution, which was conceived in the spirit of Benjamin Constant, the document was criticized mainly for its failure to pay enough attention to the basic concepts of the American constitution. They thought that the American document was much more collective in its spirit than that proposed in the draft. Indeed, Muravyov’s draft aimed at avoiding any state intervention if possible and favored the interests of the individual at the expense of those of the community. Freedom, according to his principles, had to be objective, like any other law of nature. “The crowd, just like individuals, can also become a dictator. Laws might restrict people in some way, but nothing and nobody, not even the government, can have the right to oppress others.” His views on laws in general are similar: “If the laws respect the ideas of liberty, private property and safety, they are good. If these rights are restricted, the laws are bad.” As far as theory and practice were concerned, Russian liberalism was quite balanced: the closer the hour of action came, the more the latter came to the fore. Liberalism in Russia never became purely theoretical: practice and practical thought had always been a necessity in the minds of liberal politicians. And this way of thinking was typical of both the opposition and those in power: Alexander I also used liberalism as a synonym for ‘legal institutions for achieving liberty.’ Technical details concerning how to take power became the most important questions. In the end, the movement was completely crushed, plunging liberal thinkers into the deepest despair, both philosophically and ideologically. The victorious Tsar, Nicholas I, let them know in no uncertain terms that their despair was justified. He declared the liberals and their ideas to be pre-eminent among his many enemies and waged a fierce war against them. The Decembrists and other liberal thinkers were ousted from the state apparatus and most were sent to Siberia or the Caucasian front, their careers at an end. For many decades liberals were excluded, not only from government, but also from the opposition. This inflicted serious and lasting damage on the cause of liberty in Russia and forced those who tried to breath new life into the issue to start from scratch. Nicholas I’s measures pronounced a virtual death sentence on liberalism in Russia. This proved to be particularly tragic for a movement that was already lagging behind its counterparts in the West. This setback may best be illustrated by the fact that its best representatives— for example, Nikolai Turgenev—remained totally unknown in Europe: although his main works were translated into a number of different European languages, his thought never had much of an impact on the first-line development of liberalism in Europe—nor, unfortunately, in Russia.

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The second generation of Russian liberalism adopted a quite different political attitude. Most of those who took part in the social reform program of Alexander II were pragmatic politicians, cleverly maneuvering in the political jungle, but without serious theoretical and ideological ambitions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arhiv bratyev Turgenivih, II. 1913. Dnevniki N. I. Turgeneva za 1811–1816 gg. St. Petersburg. Bakounine, T. A. 1940. Le répertoire biographique des franc-macons russes. 18–19 siècles. Série Slave 2. Bruxelles. Buryshkin, Paul. 1967. Bibliographie sur la franc-maconnerie en Russe. Paris. Constant, Benjamin. 1942. De l’esprit de conquête et de l’emancipation. Bern. Chaadayev, P. 1913–14. Sotsynyenya i pisma, I–II. Moscow. Dekabristi na Ukraini, Zb. 1–2. (1926–30). Kiev. Delvig, A. 1912. Moyi vospomynanya, I. Moscow. Druzhinin, N. 1985. Revolyucionoye dvizhenye v Rossii v XIX v. Moscow. Eydelman, N. 1973. Gercen protyv samodyerzavya. Moscow. Ikonnikov, V. 1873. Graf Mordvinov. St. Petersburg. Korf, Modest Andreevich, 1861. Zhizn grafa Speranskovo, I. Peterburg. Landa, Semen Semenovch, 1975. Dukh revolyucionih preobrazovany ... Iz istorii formirovanya ideologii i polititseskoy organizacii Decembristov, 1816–1825. Moscow: Mysl. Leontovich, Viktor, 1980. Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii, 1762–1914. Paris:YMCA Press. Lotman, Jurii, 1987. Pushkin. Budapest. ———. 1960. ‘P. A. Vyazemsky i dvizhenye Decembristov,’ in Utsonye zapiski Tartuskovo gosudarstvenovo universiteta. Trudi po russkoy I slavyanskoy filologii. III. Tartu. Lotman, L. 1960. ‘P. A. Vyazemsky i dvizhenye Decembristov,’ in Utsonye zapiski Tartuskovo gosudarstvenovo universiteta, vip. 98. Tartu. McNally, Raymond, 1971. Chaadayev and His Friends. Tallahassee, Florida: Diplomatic Press. Netskina, M. V. 1927. Obshtsestvo soyedyinonih slavyan. Moscow and Leningrad. Oksman, Ju. G. 1955. ‘Pifagorovi zakoni’ and ‘Pravila Obshtsestva soyedyinonih slavyan,’ in Nautsny ezegodnyk Saratovskogo gosidarstvenogo universiteta za 1954 god, 154–58. Saratov. Orlov, M. F. 1963. Kapytulyacya Pariza. Polititseskye Sotsynenya. Pisma. Moscow. Ost und West in der Geschichte des Denkens und kulturellen Beziehungen. 1966. Festschrift für E. Winter zum 70. Geburtstag. Berlin. Pavlov-Silvansky, N. R. 1919. Pestel. Petrograd. Pipin, A. 1900. Obshtsestvenoye dvizenye v Rossii pri Alexandre I. St. Petersburg. Pugatsov, V. 1971. ‘O specifike Decembristskoy revolyucionosty,’ in Osvoboditelnoye dvizenye v Rossii. Saratov. Rossiya v epohu reform. 1981. Frankfurt am Main.

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Semevsky, V. I. 1909. Polititseskye i obshtsestvenye idei dekabristov. St. Petersburg. Speransky, M. 1862. Druzheskye pisma k Masalskomu. St. Petersburg. Tarasov, J. I. 1923. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev v alexandrovskuyu epohu. Samara. Turgenev, Nikolai, 1916. Rossiia i russkie, I. Moscow: OGI. ———. 1936. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev. Pisma. 1811–1821. Moscow–Leningrad. Shtsogolyev, P. 1913. Istoritseskye etyudy. St. Petersburg. Vernardsky, G. 1933. Konstitucionaya hartya Rossiyskoy imperii ot 1820 goda. Paris. Vostanye dekabristov, VII. 1958. Moscow.

Empire and Nation in Russian Liberal Thought 1

ALEXANDER SEMYONOV “In contrast to continental imperialism this early English imperialism served simultaneously the integrity of the state and freedom.” B. E. Nol’de (1906) “Russia has ceased to exist… Only Russians remain.” V. O. Kliuchevskii (1905) 2

I. As historical developments at the turn of the millennium indicate the revival of nationalism in politics, intellectuals are revisiting the problems of nationalism and nation-state formation, particularly in respect of the interrelationship between nationalism and liberalism.3 The collapse of communism embodied in the dismemberment of the ‘last empire’ has caused historians to ponder the legacy of the Russian Empire. The rise of nationalism and the collapse of continental multinational empires— the Habsburg, the Romanov, and the Ottoman—in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century are usually considered to be 1

This text was written in 1999. It represents a stage in the process of thinking about the relationship between liberalism, nationalism, and empire in Russian history. I developed some threads from this text in subsequent publications in the international journal Ab Imperio dedicated to studies of empire and nationalism in the former Soviet space. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Central European University who encouraged my thinking during the History Department doctoral seminar. 2 The English translation obscures the meaning of Kliuchevskii’s words. In the original, “Rossiia” stands for Russia, which had purely political and imperial connotations in the nineteenth century; “russkie”—Russians—designates the ethnic dimension, though not exclusively the Great Russian. 3 For a rethinking on the philosophical level, see Tamir, 1993, Kymlicka, 1989, or Kymlicka, 1995, particularly the chapter ‘The History of Liberal Views on National Minorities,’ pp. 50–57, for a pre–Cold War conceptualization of liberal stances towards the problem of the multicultural political community.

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connected to one another through the process of the emergence of modern collective identities—the “imagined communities” of Benedict Anderson or ‘nationhood’ and modern nationalism as suggested by a variety of authors—which came to undermine the traditional ones.4 I consider these current intellectual trends as both an impulse to further thought and a background against which to discuss the problems of empire and nation in late imperial Russian liberal thought. The question of the imperial and national dimensions in Russian history is yet to be properly addressed and, above all, conceptualized. The present chapter is therefore an invitation to discussion, a suggestion of a possible interpretative framework in a dialogue with other approaches, rather than a comprehensive answer to all the questions. A few guidelines for this framework may be suggested before we turn to the historical analysis proper. First, it must be taken into account that recent studies of the formation of national identities have made historians rethink the problem of contingency and alternative paths in history. These studies have revealed that modern national identities— for example, the French and the British—emerged or were consciously ‘forged’ in the relatively recent past, thus refuting the allegedly primordial nature of national entities, as well as assumptions concerning nation, formation as a naturally given historical process.5 The dismantling of the British Empire gave rise to a particularly sharp discussion on whether ‘Britishness’—as an identity encompassing the United Kingdom—will survive the emergence of a new European identity without the empire.6 However, the most relativizing effect has been produced by Immanuel Wallerstein, who asks: “Does India Exist?” (Wallerstein, 1991). He argues that, from a developmental perspective, India exists inasmuch as the modern situation dictates the substantiation of the present state in terms of ‘its’ history. However, searching for ‘India’ in pre-colonial history leads to a molding of the narrative of the past in terms of present-day assumptions. What Wallerstein terms “developmentalism” resembles another trend in nineteenth-century intellectual development, namely the nationalization of the history of a given society, which, contrary to the national canon, has always been multicultural and ethnically diverse.

4

I refer here to the texts that have become classics on the theory of nationalism, namely those by Benedict Anderson, Ernst Gellner, Liah Greenfield, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rogers Brubaker. 5 The path-breaking study in this field is Weber, 1976; see also Colley, 1992. 6 In particular, Pocock has written extensively on this subject, introducing the comparative and contingent dimensions into the history of national identity; see, for example, Pocock, 1974, 1995.

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Different developments in twentieth-century historiography may be related to each other on the basis of their relativizing intent. The Wallersteinian critique of “developmentalism” suggests the abolition of modern identities on historical maps. The contextual turn in intellectual history—John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and others—abandons modern political labels associated with ideological canons, and focuses on political language as the unit of analysis. On the other hand, sociologists and historians relativize national representation of the past by linking nationalism and national identity formation to modernity (cf. Deutsch, Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Anderson). This relativizing trend in historical thought poses a question which is particularly relevant to the topic of this chapter: should Russian liberal thought be exclusively determined as either national or imperial in character? Was empire always considered as contradictory to nation, as a multinational polity? Or should empire and nation be treated rather as subject to a contextual reading and a matter of identity formation and redefinition, so leaving open the question concerning the national or imperial character of Russian liberalism? The second framework consideration deals with the concept of modernization, because this process is usually conceived as the crucial factor in national identity formation. Within this concept, an empire is treated as a pre-modern political structure, whether it manifests itself in official nationalism (Anderson) or in the composite (multiple) structure of a monarchy.7 According to the modernization premise, social change creates the conditions for nationalist success in homogenizing society. Oversimplifying this mode of reasoning, one may easily grasp that an empire, after modernization gets under way, is considered a mere residue of the past, which is succeeded by the modern nation in which social bonds create the political community.8 Nonetheless, modernization does not necessarily contradict the critique of “developmentalism” and the assertion of an alternative form of national identity formation. It is precisely modernization which brings change to social and political relationships, and creates a range of alternatives for subsequent development. However, the complexity of agen-

7

See particularly the chapter ‘Official Nationalism and Imperialism’ in Anderson, 1991. For the debate on the European composite monarchies, see, for instance, Robertson, 1995; and Elliot, 1992. 8 Insofar as my topic is bound to liberalism, I consider nation-formation and nationalism as modern phenomena more relevant to the topic than the primordialist stance towards national history (Anthony Smith) and the ethnonationalist interpretation of modern nationalism (Walker Connor).

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das for modernization should not be overlooked. As Alexander Gerschenkron has pointed out, the regional characteristics of the successive zones into which modernization spread—from the core countries of the West—determined different levels and scopes of state interference in the promotion of socioeconomic change (Gerschenkron, 1955). As far as liberalism is concerned, in this situation the classical liberal doctrine of laissez-faire cannot serve the liberal goal.9 In the regions where modernization was a process of importation and emulation of the West, the state was considered not in terms of society–power relations, but rather as a promoter of civilization and the ‘creator’ of society. Furthermore, the socioeconomic component of modernization may be overshadowed by the state’s need to establish an efficient army, bureaucratic order, legal cohesion, and social hierarchy. These peculiar goals of modernization underpinned the reformist tradition of Russian autocracy throughout its imperial history, beginning with Peter the Great. However, this tradition was at odds with the liberal values of individual freedom and social initiative, because the creation of modern state institutions was achieved at the expense of social and individual freedom.10 As Marc Raeff argues, modernization in early modern history corresponds merely to the idea of a Polizeistaat rather than to liberal principles and socioeconomic change (Raeff, 1994). Thus, the modernization perspective—both in socioeconomic and state-reformist terms—complicates the picture of liberal thinking in Russia by introducing the mentally constructed ideal of the West and by ‘orientalizing’ pre-modern social relationships. The socioeconomic perspective in thought concerning modernization correlates nation-formation and modernization. It also implies a vision of empire as a stronghold of traditional elements—based on legal and not social foundations, and affiliated with Gemeinschaft—whereas the nation stands as the bearer of modernity. Contrary to this conceptualization, the state-reformist— Polizeitstaat—understanding of modernization substantiates a historical alternative to the succession from empire to nation. Writings on both national-identity formation and modernization refer to the comparative dimension of the two processes. Indeed, the reference to the ‘other’ has served as point of departure for the construction 9 10

For the economic perspective of liberal doctrine, see Laski, 1936. Modernization without liberalization was conceptualized in late imperial historiography, which turned to social history and was fused with oppositional political sentiments. One representative of this trend was Paul Miliukov, who ascertained the continuity of government policy in enslavement of society for the purpose of the modernization of the state from the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and throughout the Petrine reforms; see Miliukov, 1892; and Rieber, 1982.

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of many national identities.11 In addition, the process of modernization is usually characterized as the spread of social change from the core countries to the periphery, in which the recipients of modernity assume a comparative point of reference—positive and negative—to the constructed ‘West.’ These considerations suggest that the comparative perspective should be the third component of the analytical framework. However, the comparative vision of historical process existed long before the emergence of comparative history as a discipline. The first problem that comparative history students of Central and Eastern Europe encounter is the deeply entrenched symbolic geography of Eastern Europe.12 This symbolic geography is particularly interwoven with the concepts of nation and empire. The classic instance is Hans Kohn’s classification of nationalisms according to their political (modern) or ethnic (backward) foci (Kohn, 1960). Many of the recent comparative studies on empires center around the notion of continental empires—meaning the Habsburg, the Russian, and the Ottoman—and exclude the category of the nation-state (for example, Barkey and von Hagen, 1997). This comparative focus may be legitimate from the standpoint of social and institutional history, but for those studying the history of discourse, such a selection appears to create an improper comparative context, as the intellectual debates of the period in question were anchored in comparisons with Western Europe. Many historians question the validity of cognitive mapping as a guideline for historical research. In the last chapter of his classic study on the formation of French national identity, Eugene Weber ponders the difference between the policy of imperialism towards the colonial periphery and the nationalizing policy of the French state towards its own rural periphery in the nineteenth century. He finds it artificial conceptually to differentiate between the two, thereby contesting another mental mapping connected with ‘orientalism’ (Weber, 1976, pp. 486–96). Following this criticism, one may contemplate crossing the border between the concepts of nation-state and multinational empire, and consider the empire as a potential nation-state. Particularly interesting may be a diachronic comparison between the early modern Western European empires and the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. As Pocock has suggested, the crisis of the British empire in the eighteenth century 11

Linda Colley dwells particularly on the perception of the ‘other’ when analyzing the role of the Anglo-French wars in the formation of ‘Britishness’: see Colley, 1992. 12 For the construction of this mental mapping, see Wolff, 1994. This particular vision of social characteristics connected with the region endures in the twentieth century, re-surfacing, for example, in Huntington’s scheme of the clash of civilizations.

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should be described as a crisis of the composite monarchy and of traditional political identity rather than in terms of imperialist opposition to colonial independence.13 Given the fact that some Russian lawyers presented the Russian Empire as a European composite monarchy, lacking national identity, the comparison does not seem absolutely absurd.14 Overall, the placement of the Russian Empire and its discourse in a proper comparative context is a task yet to be performed.

II. The history of Russian liberalism is an intensely debated issue. It lies at the nexus of both the contemporary version of the philosophical ‘Slavophiles versus Westernizers’ controversy and the political dispute over the transition to democracy. After the fall of communism, liberalism came to constitute an alternative to the so-called ‘October Revolution’ in the narrative of pre-Revolutionary Russian history. Much of Russian scholarly interest in the rise of liberal parties at the beginning of the twentieth century may be related to an alternative approach to the history of the ‘October Revolution.’ 15 The image of liberalism that emerged after the collapse of communism is more homogeneous than the one that appeared after the October Revolution in the writings of exiled liberals. When rethinking pre-Revolutionary liberal politics, these émigrés pondered the failure of this political option, turning to a more conservative interpretation of liberalism. Particularly prominent was the debate between Vasilii Maklakov and Paul Miliukov. Maklakov attempted to

13

The salient thesis is that the imperial crisis stemmed from the internal problems of the British polity, particularly the concept of ‘imperium,’ which was created to stave off civil war. This concept was expressed in the formula ‘the king in parliament,’ according to which granting political autonomy to American colonies was considered to strengthen the king vis-à-vis Parliament, and, therefore, to initiate civil war. Although one may argue that there was no tradition of constitutionalism in Russia, it may be stated, without overlooking the obvious differences, that the concept of ‘imperium,’ closely associated with the concept of autocracy, posed similar linguistic limitations—coming from inside the discourse of power—on the introduction of political autonomy and self-government in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Pocock, 1995b. 14 This argument is advance by Boris Nol’de, whose works are analyzed below. 15 The problem of historical alternatives surfaced in the ‘Perestroika’ years in the atmosphere of democratization and republication of émigré historians, as well as in pre-Revolutionary political texts (such as Vekhi). See the most recent account in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, 1997. For studies on Russian liberal parties in post-Soviet historiography, see Shelokhaev, 1996; Khailova, 1994; As far as American historiography is concerned, see Emmons, 1983.

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differentiate between the notions of political radicalism—in his view the course pursued by the majority of the Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet) party under the leadership of Miliukov—and ‘genuine’ liberalism oriented towards civil liberties.16 In light of the ongoing highly politicized debate on the definition of liberalism, a precise doctrinal definition of this historical phenomenon is next to impossible, particularly given the fact that liberals preferred to identify themselves by means of negative—non-partisan, non-autochthonist, anti-autocratic—rather than positive characteristics.17 A particular example of such a negative definition was the platform of the Union of Liberation (1901–03), which united a broad spectrum of political forces from social democrats to moderate liberals under the umbrella of opposition to autocracy (Freeze, 1969; Shatsillo, 1974). It must also be noted that discourse had been changing throughout the nineteenth century, responding to new challenges in Russian life and following intellectual novelties coming from Western Europe. In the words of Miliukov, one of the liberal leaders: “The term liberalism is worn out in Russia. This is, of course, not because the liberal program is already realized. Far from being so, this program presents now the first step to be attained … But, of course, this first step is not acknowledged to be the only one: freedom and individual liberty no longer seem to be the absolute good … In the eyes of subsequent generations [after the French Revolution], liberalism was rather discredited as a sort of class policy, that of the ‘third estate,’ and thus anti-democratic.” (Miliukov, 1962, p. 168) By analyzing liberal references to history, it is possible to designate, in broad terms, the major intellectual pillars of their doctrine. Undoubtedly, the first is the legacy of the Enlightenment. This tradition was brought to Russia largely by the autocracy and was closely associated with its reformist policies. In the wake of the reforms of Peter the Great this tradition also had connotations of Europeanization. The reception of this tradition brought about the first discussion of collective identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the

16

For a description of the debate, see Karpovich, 1955. This conservative turn is also visible in Leontovich, 1995. 17 The great Russian historian Sergei Solovyov pinpoints the “mirror effect” as the main determinant of the Russian liberal tradition. He contended that Russian liberals lacked an internal profile and designated their program according to the current policy of the autocracy, which intermittently switched from reform to reaction and back again; see Solovyov, 1992. The same argument is sustained by his student Vasilii Kliuchevskii, another great historian, who asserted that repression on the side of autocracy was mirrored in the Russian intelligentsia’s terrorist tactics and nihilist Weltanschauung, see Kliuchevskii, 1993.

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form of an inquiry into the type of civilization that Russia belonged to. An original answer to this question was given within the framework of European Romanticism, when it was received and adopted by Russian Slavophiles. Their formula of Russian civilization cannot be equated either with the Russian state or with ethnic ‘Russianness’: the state was associated with the destruction of the ‘organic spirit’ and social ties of pre-Petrine society, as it was the main transmitter of ‘alien’ European culture. The category of narodnost’ was defined in cultural, anthropological, and global (Hegelian) terms.18 Subsequent generations of intellectuals, although taking this philosophical debate as their point of departure, did not follow its ontological obsession. A spectacular example of this development is Boris Chicherin, who was close to Slavophile circles, but was later attracted by the more ‘technical’ aspects of social thought, such as jurisprudence, natural science, and public administration (Chicherin, 1934; Hamburg, 1992). However, the Enlightenment tradition created two discourses specifically relevant to the problems of empire and nation in liberal thought. The first was embodied in the famous ‘juridical school’ of Russian historiography (Kavelin, Solovyov, Chicherin). It hinged on the assumption that autocracy was a necessary pillar of the Russian state. The historians who elaborated this concept focused on institutions and legal norms in Russian history. In terms of the history of political language, this was an attempt to appropriate the concept of autocracy and to redefine it in a reformist–Enlightenment perspective, in a manner conducive to the social and liberal cause. The problem of empire was not recognized as such: as the notion of empire was closely linked to that of autocracy, the problem of empire was to be solved along the same lines, that is, by the Europeanization of autocracy. Such a stance became obsolete when Russian monarchs attempted to redefine autocracy in terms of collective identity, associating it with Orthodoxy, Russianness, and Slavdom in general.19 Another founding element of late imperial Russian liberalism also originated from the ‘juridical school.’ This was legalist language or legal philosophy, as Andrzej Walicki put it, which was most outspokenly expressed in the Zemstvo–constitutionalist movement, and in the language of ‘legality’ widespread on the eve of the 1905 Revolution.20 Those who 18

One of the first deconstructions of Slavophile thought was carried out by Miliukov, who pointed out that narodnost’ in this discourse mattered only insofar as it could contribute to world culture with a specific spirit and traits; see Miliukov, 1902. For an account of Slavophilism, see Walicki, 1975. 19 See Wortman, 1992, 1995, 1997. 20 See Walicki, 1992. The constitutionalist platform of the Zemstvo movement is analyzed in Fischer, 1958. The corpus of constitutional projects is scrutinized in Medushevskii, 1998.

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pursued the legalist approach believed that the major problems of the empire could be solved by changes in the political order, that is, by the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and self-government. The problem of subject nationalities was also thought to be soluble in this fashion. Such a solution was possible in terms of the rejection of public politics based on collective identities. Indeed, these liberals—mainly from the Zemstvo milieu and with some legal training—denounced the policy of Russification, as well as the ‘nationalist’ ideologies of the Black Hundred and separatist movements. They shared the program of introducing the ‘rule of law,’ the most vivid reverberation of the Polizeistaat. Its interpretation varied from the restoration of an impartial enlightened government—not harassing particular social and ethnic groups—to the democratization of the regime. The legalist perspective underpinned the official program of the Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet) party in respect of the nationality question.21 It was a peculiar synthesis of the classical European formula, ‘constitutional government—individual rights’, with the Austro-Marxist program of cultural autonomy. The national autonomy option was fervently debated, but not institutionalized, however. A similar case was the European liberal program on nationalities.22 Interestingly, this segment of liberal views on the problem of nationality to some degree resembled the principle of the imperial government, according to which individuals of non–Great Russian and sometimes even non-Russian ethnicity were promoted, but prohibited from developing a separate collective identity.23 However, even within the legalist perspective, which postulated a lack of tension between national identities, the nationality question proved to be a stumbling block for liberal thought concerning the transformation of autocracy and the empire. Opinions clashed as to whether the constitutional traditions of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland, together with the ancient privileges of the Baltic nobility, conformed to the liberal understanding of constitutionalism. The prominent lawyer and Kadet Nol’de expressed doubts as to whether these constitutional traditions complied with the concept of the 21

Polnyii sbornik platform vsekh Russkikh politicheskikh partii (St Petersburg, 1906). For a discussion of the program, see S’ezdy i konferentsii Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskoi partii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1996). 22 Although a multinational polity was advocated in British liberal thought (for instance, by Lord Acton), the impossibility of democracy in multinational states as depicted by John Stuart Mill seemed to prevail in European liberal thought: see Kymlicka, 1995; Acton, 1985; Mill, 1991. 23 See Miller, 1997. A similar imperial mechanism based on the ‘fair’ individual treatment of people of other nationalities is pinpointed by Colley, 1992, p. 8.

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modern state and, consequently, with liberal principles.24 In his view, the abolition of the privileged status of the Russian Empire’s western borderlands was the logical consequence of the growth of a modern state— characterized by legal and territorial cohesion—comparable with Western European development. However, the same logic later required the introduction of political autonomy, stemming from the indivisibility of the modern state. His opponents, not following Nol’de’s modernization premise, undertook the defense of the ‘ancient constitution,’ describing the autocracy’s policy—very much in the spirit of ‘revolutionary monarch’ rhetoric—as a violation of granted constitutions and liberties.25 Nol’de’s position must be related to the understanding of modernity in terms of the so-called Polizeistaat, which did not require the alignment of the state with national identity for the sake of preserving the state’s integrity. This standpoint could, therefore, hardly be deemed national. Neither was it imperial, however, because it conceived of the empire as a political anachronism. Nol’de’s opponents drew heavily on the imperial legacy, particularly its concept of a temporary contractual relationship between the imperial core and the borderlands. This view was sometimes held not on the basis of devotion to liberal principles, but because the liberal interpretation of the nationality question was congenial to the promotion of a separate national identity.26

24

Nol’de was the first Russian liberal to be seriously interested in the conceptualization of the imperial order. In his major work written before emigration (Nol’de, 1911), he proposed a framework for the history of the empire’s formation, the key element of which was the idea of a multifaceted compromise between the borderlands and the imperial core. Inquiring into the history of the treatises, Nol’de found out that they were not merely international treatises, but also domestic. This he took to support his view that the Russian state had the right to assert its sovereignty over the borderlands. However, analyzing the European political experience, he concluded that the imperial mechanism should be decentralized on the basis of autonomy and self-government; see Nol’de (1906). 25 See the recurrent debates on the problem of the legal status of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland in Pravo and Vestnik Evropy—the most representative liberal periodicals—throughout 1904 and 1905. 26 Miliukov, who can by no means be suspected of sympathizing with nationalist–separatist movements, asserted that autocracy violated its own laws when it encroached upon Finnish autonomy, so ‘breeding revolution’; see Miliukov, 1962, p. 365. Professor Verde’s position in the debate which took place in Pravo revealed that Finnish identity assumed the existence of a separate legal entity: the ending of autonomy was wrong not only because it was in violation of the law, but because it impinged upon the nationality issue; see Verde, ‘Buduschee russkoe narodnoe poredstavitel’stvo i Finliandiia,’ Pravo (22 July 1905).

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Nol’de’s view is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that liberalism need not have an assimilatory cultural program if it eschews the interpretation of modernity as a nexus of collective identities. Whether this program was feasible in the twentieth century is another question. The second discourse stemming from the Enlightenment legacy which characterized Russian liberalism was an ethnographic one. This intellectual development must be understood within the framework of the conceptual dichotomy ‘civilization–barbarism,’ in the context of the relationship between the enlightened center—the capital and the imperial court—and the ‘barbarous’ provinces.27 In this way it was possible to interpret ethnic differences within the empire as simply local and ‘ethnographic,’ at least in terms of a nineteenth-century ethnography, which viewed its object as ‘inferior’ cultures,28 subject to elimination in the course of the advancement of civilization. In the nineteenth century, this stance merged with the discourse of ‘obschestvennost,’ 29 which originated in the same Enlightenment tradition. The pivotal element of this discourse was the concept of society, which was understood as a complex of social bonds, cemented by a shared consciousness (identity). If one is to look for a modern understanding of nationhood in Russian intellectual history, it must be found in the concept of ‘obschestvennost.’ Miliukov, one of the most consistent adherents of this discourse, made a distinction between the pre-Petrine social ties (Gemeinschaft) and post-reform social developments. In his view, pre-reform Russian society was not independent of the state and had no self-consciousness. Social development after the reforms acquired “critical thinking” from European culture, which became the key element of modern society

27

Larry Wolff’s concept seems to preveail in thinking about the symbolic geography of the Enlightenment with the stress on the implication of the Enlightenment mapping on the external relationship, that is between the regions (Western-Eastern Europe). However, for the sake of the argument in this essay the internal implication of the same cognitive mapping is considered. Among the recent studies on this aspect of the Enlightenment, see McDonald, 1997; for the European Enlightenment, see the statement of the problem in Giesen, 1998. 28 This was a Europe-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century: see, for example, Said, 1994; and Stocking, 1987. 29 An approximate translation of the term is ‘socialness.’ The hypothesis that there was a historical connection between the Enlightenment and the concept of modern nationalism is widespread: see Walicki, 1989. For an interpretation of ‘obschestvennost’ in the perspective of modern nationhood, see Miliukov, 1903, 1925.

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formation based on collective identity. It also contributed to the emancipation of society from the state (Miliukov, 1903, pp. 12–13). According to this hierarchy of cultures, the European (imperial) culture of rationality should have prevailed over the ‘ethnographic’ cultural traditions associated with local ethnic divisions. However, the imperial culture did not coincide with the Great Russian cultural tradition. The latter was ‘orientalized’ in liberal discourse alongside the ‘Little Russian’ (Ukrainian) and Belorussian ‘ethnographic’ traditions.30 Thus, the whole of what was known as the Russian state—that is, the empire without Congress Poland and Finland—was conceived as a project of modern nation building. The use of such categories as ‘tribe,’ ‘tribesmen,’ ‘tribal composition of the population’ by some liberal writers should be taken seriously, as they stem from the heart of the ethnographic discourse and are not just anachronisms. They imply a particular framework for thinking about the nationality question in the empire. However, the “ethnographic discourse” had come to grips with the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, which could by no means be explained in terms of the cultural inferiority paradigm. Indeed, these were the most developed regions of the empire (Finland, Congress Poland, the Baltic littoral), through which Russian reformers often acquired the agents of Europeanization and models to follow (Thaden, 1984). Vasilii Kliuchevskii spoke eloquently of this tension: “There was a contradiction in the ethnographic composition of the empire between the Western European and Eastern Asiatic borderlands. There [in the Western borderlands] regions and nationalities were conquered whose cultures were superior to ours. Here [in the Eastern borderlands] the culture is inferior. There we cannot cope with the conquered because we are unable to attain the same level of cultural development; here we are unwilling to tackle the problem because we despise them and are not able to raise them to our [level of] culture. [Both] here and there the people are not our equals, and so they are our enemies.” (Kliuchevskii, 1993, pp. 406–407)31 30

Miliukov in his ‘ocherki’ showed little admiration for the Great Russian cultural tradition, particularly in respect of the influence of Little Russian culture. For a recent historical account, see Saunders, 1985. Another liberal (of Ukrainian origin) conceptualized the idea of Russian imperial culture as cosmopolitan; see Slavinskii, 1910. 31 The geographical designations (“here” and “there”) are preserved in the translation because they reveal an interesting positioning of Russia in terms of the opposition West–East. This is the most spectacular example of the identity crisis, as Russia lacks a separate symbolic geographical place in this31 quotation. It is (subconsciously?) included in the East (“here”) and may only be distinguished in terms of a specific culture.

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III. The way out of this dilemma was conceived as the introduction of political autonomy in the ‘civilized’ regions. Therefore, Miliukov and his followers joined those who advocated the retention of ancient privileges in the debate being conducted within the framework of legalist discourse. Insofar as they understood modernization in social terms, rather than in relation to a modern state, they saw no contradiction between modernity and ancient political privileges. Pyotr Struve stood on the margins of the legalist and ‘obschestvennost’ discourses, advocating a peculiar merger of the concept of nation with that of imperialism. In terms of intellectual horizons, he was a social democrat, genuinely interested in economic problems, who later converted to liberalism on political principle (Pipes, 1970; 1980). Like Georgii Plekhanov, he recognized the significant role of the state in economic development (Struve, 1913), and so insisted on a joint effort on the part of both society and the state in modernizing the Russian economy. The basis for such cooperation Struve saw in the national idea, which was associated with the creation of internal and external markets for Russian goods. The prerequisite for the internal market was linguistic homogeneity. This was the motivation behind Struve’s notorious opposition to a separate Ukrainian culture.32 The external market was to be won with the help of Slavic ties and the released entrepreneurial potential of such nationalities as the Jews and the Armenians, which were congenial to the liberal desire to free the Slavic nations from Ottoman rule and to introduce individual equality (Struve, 1997). Struve’s concept of nation hinged on collective identity. However, the key was not culture but economics. His concept of imperialism had nothing to do with the empire in the sense of legalist discourse. He borrowed directly from British sources to emphasize the economic foundations of liberalism. Therefore, his imperialism was closely affiliated with that of Joseph Chamberlain and Iu. Witte.33 Overall, one can see that the problem of empire and nation produced a number of interpretations in late imperial liberal thought. This strik-

32

The position of Struve on the Ukrainian question sparked a debate within the Kadet party. Centrist liberals feared the alienation of the national factions from the party center and so opposed Struve’s standpoint, associating it with the imperial policy of tsarism (an inadequate account); see ‘Ukrainets. K voprosu o samostoiatel’nosti ukrainskoi kul’tury,’ Russkaia mysl’ 5 (1911); Struve, 1912; Miliukov, 1914. 33 For further reading on the new imperialism in connection with nationalism and modernization, see Szporluk (1988).

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ing variety can be explained in terms of discursive differences, which centered around the acceptance or rejection of collective identity. However, the concepts of empire and nation were not ‘naturally given,’ nor were they essentially contradictory. Some Russian liberals did not even recognize the problem. These concepts were involved in a complex process of the definition and redefinition of collective identity, regardless of whether it was accepted or rejected. In this process the intellectual legacies of Russian liberalism interacted with new ideas, stemming from a changing reality or European intellectual fashions. The process resulted in different conceptual configurations of the concept of empire and nation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Acton, Edward, Valentin Cherniaev, and William Rosenberg. 1997. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. London: Arnold. Acton, John. 1985. ‘Nationality’, in Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. R. Fears. Vol. 1: Essays in the History of Liberty, 409–33. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barkey, Karen, and Mark von Hagen, eds. 1997. After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union, and Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Boulder: Westview Press. Chicherin, Boris. 1934. Vospominaniia. Vols. 1–2. Moscow. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven–London: Yale University Press. Elliot, John. 1992. ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies.’ Past and Present 134. Emmons, Terence. 1983. The Formation of Political Parties and the First Elections in Russia, 1902–1906. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Fischer, George. 1958. Russian Liberalism from Gentry to Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Freeze, Gregory. 1969. ‘The National Liberation Movement and the Shift in Russian Liberalism, 1901–1903.’ Slavic Review 28, no. 1: 81–92. Gerschenkron, Alexander. 1955. ‘The Problem of Economic Development in the Russian Intellectual History of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. E. J. Simmons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Giesen, Bernhard. 1998. ‘Cosmopolitans, Patriots, Jacobeans, Romantics.’ Daedalus (Summer): 221–51. Hamburg, Gary. 1992. Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Karpovich, Michael. 1955. ‘Two Types of Russian Liberalism: Maklakov and Miliukov,’ in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. E. J. Simmons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kliuchevskii, Vasilii. O. 1993. Aforizmy. Istoricheskie portrety i etiudy. Dnevniki. Moscow: Mysl.

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Kohn, Hans. 1960. Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology. New York: Vintage Books. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laski, Harold J. 1936. The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation. London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd. Leontovich, Viktor. 1995. Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii: 1762–1914. Moscow: Russkii put. McDonald, David. 1997. ‘Provincialism: Eighteenth-Century Russia’s Gift to the Future.’ Kennan Institute lecture, 30 October. Medushevskii, Aleksandr. 1998. Demokratiia i avtoritarizm: Rossiiskii konstitutsionalizm v sravnitelnoi perspektive. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Miliukov, Pavel. 1902. ‘The Decay of Slavophilism. Danilevskii, Leont’iev, Solovyov,’ in Iz istorii russkoi intelligentsii. St Peterburg. ———. 1903. Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury. Vol. 3. Introduction. St Petersburg. ———. 1914. ‘Ukrainskii vopros i P. B. Struve.’ Rech’ 9/22 (November). ———. 1925. Natsional’nii vopros. n. p. ———. 1962. Russia and Its Crisis. New York: Collier Books. Mill, John Stuart. 1991. Considerations on Representative Government. Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus Books. Nol’de, Boris. 1911. Ocherki po istorii russkago gosudarstvennago prava. St Petersburg. ———. 1906. ‘Angliia i eia avtonomnyia kolonii.’ Vestnik Evropy 9: 5–37. Pipes, Richard. 1970. Struve. Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1980. Struve. Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pocock, John. 1974. ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject.’ New Zealand Historical Journal 8. ———. 1995a. ‘Conclusion. Contingency, Identity, Sovereignty’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. Stringer. Routledge. ———. 1995b. ‘The Varieties of British Political Thought’: Part 1: ‘Political Thought in the English Speaking Atlantic’, and Part 2: ‘Empire, Revolution, and the End of Early Modernity’, in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. J. Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raeff, Marc. 1994. ‘The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in 17th–18th-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,’ in Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia. Boulder: Westview Press. Rieber, Alfred. 1982. Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Robertson, John. 1995. ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern Political Order,’ in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. J. Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.

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The Value System of Serb Liberalism IMRE RESS

I. The nineteenth century was a period of great national awakenings in Central and Eastern Europe. During this time the Serbs had no homogeneous nation-state; they lived in different states characterized by various social and political backgrounds. Within the framework of the multi-national Habsburg monarchy they could enjoy the advantages of a comparatively prosperous society, which guaranteed its citizens relative security of property and provided them with a reasonable level of comfort and stability, in a period when social unrest and uprisings constituted a not inconsiderable threat to personal assets. The national principality of the Serbs held out the prospect and the hope of an independent state, while under the Ottoman Empire they lived under the constraints of feudal subordination. As a result of the variety of systems, administrations, and social, political, and economic conditions under which the Serbs lived, the development of Serbian liberalism from the middle of the nineteenth century manifested itself in many different forms. In the multi-national Habsburg Empire, support for national emancipation had become the main characteristic of liberalism. But the spiritual preparation for the national unification deriving from the Serb state-idea, was to dominate the liberalism in the national principality. Their main aim was to unite the Serbs, and they devoted all their efforts to constructing and formulating the necessary theoretical and practical framework within which this unity could be developed. The best way to grasp the distinctive features of Serbian liberalism is to compare and contrast the writings of Svetozar Mileti∆ (1826–1901), who lived in the Habsburg Empire, with those of Vladimir Jovanovi∆ (1833–1922), who was based in the Principality. Although liberalism had diverse forms and directions in the different Serbian territories, they shared some similarities. The common thread of the Serbian liberal currents is that they were aimed not at cancelling the estate relations; instead as they surfaced in the era of the capitalist economic-social consolidation, they tended to supply the absolutism resticting the individual and national freedom, for a representative and self-governing system. In contrast with typical European liberalism, which was basically antifeudalistic and

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organized itself with the intention of eliminating the archaic feudal structures of order and vassalage, Serbian liberalism aimed at substituting the absolutist system, which restricted the rights of both the individual and the nation, for a less centralized system based on the principles of selfdetermination and autonomy. Thus, even in the earliest phase of Serbian liberalism, the basic attitude was that of anti-absolutism. From the outset, they rejected all the neo-absolutist efforts of the centralized state bureaucracy of the Habsburg monarchy, which aimed to civilize and modernize the state machinery. At the same time, in the Principality, the liberals fought against the autocracy of the reigning prince, who relied on a narrow oligarchic circle. It was only at the end of the 1850s that Serbian liberalism could be recognized as an independent trend of thought and political movement under both the Habsburg monarchy and the Principality. In both states the main activists within the liberal movement came from the same social stratum, that is, professionals of non-noble birth, most of whom had gained a good foreign education and worked freelance. Popular support for their ideas was recruited from the rank and file of the trading bourgeoisie and the urban intelligentsia.1 Although these two trends of liberalism had many similar characteristics, I shall examine them separately, because the development of liberal thought was not independent of the changes of the political and social preconditions. This was especially true of the Habsburg monarchy, within which the Serbian opinion was closely shaped by the possible place of the Serbs in the state. Considering the fact that the Habsburg Empire had more than one million inhabitants of Serbian origin, it is quite clear that regional differences cannot be ignored either. The Serbs dwelt in various regions of the empire. In some places they resided in large continuous territories, constituting relatively homogeneous ethnic blocks, while elsewhere they lived in small communities scattered all over the empire, wedged between administratively and legally separated regions with very different social and economic backgrounds. In Transleithania, for example, they had communities in the Hungarian territory of the monarchy, in the gradually disappearing military borderland zone which was becoming more and more civilian, and in the autonomous Croatia and Slavonia. In the Cis-leithan part of the empire they resided in Dalmatia and, after 1878, in two occupied territories, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The liberals in the highly developed South Hungarian territory had an especially strong political and ideological influence on the future of the Serb nation. It was a Voivodian lawyer, Svetozar Mileti∆, who organized Serbian liberalism into an independent political force in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of his

1

∂ubrilovi∆, 1958, pp. 236–48.

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greatest achievements was to turn the ideas of national emancipation into a practical movement. Although he did not leave us any comprehensive theoretical works, the role he played in the Parliament and the great number of essays he published make it possible to draw a fairly clear picture of the form of liberalism he represented.2

II. 1. It was only after the fall of the neo-absolutist system that the Serbian liberals in South Hungary took a determined stand, demanding national and liberal commands. They became an influential political factor in the Serbian community of Hungary in the decade following the tentative introduction of a constitutional government in 1860–61 and especially after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. Although at the time of the European revolutions in the middle of the nineteenth century, the liberals’ ideas and objectives were not yet clearly shaped as an independent ideology, 1848–49 was an important moment in the history of Serbian liberalism in Hungary. At that time, the liberals more or less accepted the ideas of the mainstream Serbian national movement dominated by a traditional, feudal leadership, an orthodox clergy, and the military bureaucracy of the border territory. The main enemy of the Serb nationalists was the Hungarian revolutionary government, which endeavored to defend the integrity of the Hungary of King Saint Stephen and to maintain Hungarian supremacy in the region. The Serb patriots’ interests were diametrically opposed to this. They sought to maintain the framework of the monarchy and to achieve an Austro-Slavic type of confederation. Around 1848–49, the Serb national movement in Hungary was quite homogeneous, and the war was not the only reason for this lack of differentiation. It is noteworthy that all nationalists basically agreed on the most important social and national issues: none of the political movements questioned, for example, the basic social achievements of the bourgeois revolution, neither did they question the emancipation of the serfs, or their legal equality. However, there is no doubt that their main purpose was to achieve the national emancipation of the Serbs as a whole, and to establish Voivodina in accordance with the principle of territorial autonomy, thus assuring the unification of those areas in which the Serbs were in a relative majority. They were unanimous in their

2

See sources in Kemény, 1952, Jerkov, 1939, and Petrovi∆, 1968. For literature on Mileti∆’s life and works, see Petrovi∆, 1958, Jovanovi∆, 1983.

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demand for a state-level relationship between Voivodina and the threein-one Croatian Kingdom to counterbalance the power of Hungary. In addition, they all agreed that this Southern Slavic state formation must remain within the framework of a confederate-type Habsburg Empire. What made these ideas characteristically liberal was the need for a parliamentary representative system and the passionate awareness of the Slav solidarity.3 The absolutist regime after the 1848–49 revolutions did not fulfill any of its national-liberal hopes. Although for a decade after the revolutions, the Serbs enjoyed a kind of territorial-administrative independence in Hungary, political power and governance remained absolutist and highly centralized, and the official language was still German. This rigidity meant that their autonomy was purely formal and that the kind of independence it assured was not national emancipation in any real sense. At the end of the 1850s even this formal autonomy was withdrawn. This was when the monarchy suffered defeat in Italy, and internal political dissatisfaction strengthened. As a result, the central government felt compelled to reform the governmental structure of the state. Conservative reforms were initiated by the court, and, as such, aimed at reconstructing the old, historical base of the monarchy to preserve the unity of the empire. In the spirit of these reforms, they reconstituted the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary. The consequence was that Serb Voivodina was dismantled, becoming part of the Hungarian county system again. This measure restored the political supremacy of the Hungarian landowning aristocracy. This failure, as well as the disappointment and bitterness which came in its wake, was undoubtedly significant in changing the attitudes of the Serbian liberals in Hungary after 1860–61.

2. The religious-national congress held in the spring of 1861 discussed the necessary constitutional reforms concerning the monarchy. The liberals, although they were still in a minority at this congress, had finally renounced what had been the policy of the Serb national movement for more than a century: to wait for changes from above, that is, from the imperial government. According to the new policy, rather than relying on the emperor’s benevolence and reviving their privileges of dubious legitimacy or claiming archaic historical rights, they tried to achieve and legitimize their national goals by resorting to modern national and natural rights discourse. They fought for a bourgeois constitution, which

3

Thim, 1930–1940; Spira, 1980; Radeni∆, 1983, pp. 93–134.

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they considered a guarantee of the rights they strove for, and they fought for to concede these rights the Hungarian Parliament. Their cooperation with the Hungarian liberals—who fought for and wanted acknowledgment of the continuity of constitutional rights, and the recognition of the 1848 laws, which contained the basic achievements of the bourgeois revolution—was based on the fact that both parties considered the highly centralized and unified monarchy to be the most serious hindrance to achieving their fundamental national aims. When putting forward their views on the recognition of the Serbs as an independent group within Hungary, the Serb progressive thinkers always referred to natural rights, claiming that, as a separate linguistic– ethnic community, they were entitled to this status; indeed, they argued for their entitlement to a separate autonomous territory. This implied that they opposed all the aims towards which the Habsburg monarchy was striving: principally, a reform program that would change the empire in the old, dynastic way, on the basis of historical law. The Serbs rejected all the reform versions of centralism, federalism, or hegemonic Austro-Hungarian dualism. The idea of Hungarian statehood was acceptable to them, since it embodied the principle of constitutionality and parliamentarism, and as such could serve as a possible framework for Serb emancipation and other national ambitions. At the same time, they hoped that the Hungarian liberals would offer them a kind of personal union with Austria. Since the Hungarians were the only nation that had made serious and to some extent successful attempts to separate themselves from the Austrians, the Serbs considered them the only power that could destroy the highly centralized system of imperial absolutism. In addition, they expected an independent Hungary to realize the principle of national emancipation and hoped that the Habsburgs would no longer be able to hinder the free gravitation of national communities, the liberation of the Balkan nations, and the unification of all Serbs. The birth of this idea was closely connected to the potential establishment of a Greater Germany. Mileti∆ and other Serb thinkers supposed that Hungary, in order to balance the power of such a Germany, would be forced to form an alliance with neighboring emancipated nations on equal terms. These were the ideas Mileti∆ relied on when he drafted the so-called federal dualistic political program of the Serb liberals in Southern Hungary in the summer of 1866. The main purpose of the program was to federalize the historical territory of Hungary and to declare the autonomy of the affiliated countries of Croatia and Transylvania. These ideas did not find acceptance in the circle of the Hungarian liberals. All these tendencies constituted a kind of ill omen, indicating that after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, when the restoration of a centralized empire and absolutist methods would become almost impossible, the

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common liberal platform and solidarity, the result of sharing the common enemy of Habsburg absolutism, would not be adequate to cover up all the differences and national animosities between the Serbs and the Hungarians.4

3. Although the Hungarian liberals were not ready to give up the political integrity of Hungary, they afforded many rights to the minority nations, including extensive individual human and civil rights. These minority groupings could take an active part in the political life of Hungary at both the national and the local levels, and use their native languages in primary as well as secondary school education. At the same time, the national minorities were given the freedom to organize their own cultural lives. Nevertheless, the minorities were not completely satisfied with the Hungarian constitutional government. This is reflected by the shift in the demands of the Serbian community in Hungary. Under absolutism, the Serbian Liberal Party fought for the principes of constitutionality and nationality, while after the 1867 Compromise the slogan became “liberty and nationality.” This new attitude is recognizable in the draft that Mileti∆ prepared for the annual meeting of the Serb liberals in Nagybecskerek in 1869. In his philosophy, liberty and nation were synonymous, that is, the liberty of a national community is considered to be the ultimate form of liberty. “The principles of liberty and nationality are not contradictory. If and when they are in contradiction, it is always the manifestation of centuries-long social injustice and the result of some people’s and some strong nations’ efforts to separate the two notions. It is the task of our generation to destroy these dividing walls, monopolies and privileges, and so on. Nationality and liberty are one and the same thing; nationality is the quintessence of a nation’s liberty. That is why our slogan has always been and will always be liberty and nationality in the broadest sense of the words. That is why we have to encourage the liberty and the nationality of all Serbs in every single country where they live in a relatively large number and have a relatively strong political influence.” 5 In every multinational state the principle and prerequisite of a nation’s liberty lies in the existence of corporate rights and of a national community’s authority to govern itself. The Serb liberals’ demand for territorial autonomy, and, after 1867, their demand for the right to use their national language, and to establish municipalities in the counties, towns,

4 5

Haselsteiner, 1976, pp. 39–45, 70–95; Petrovi∆, 1968, pp. 1–19, 223–31. Mileti∆ [1869a] in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 136–48.

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villages based on the extension of electoral rights and popular representation, all served the interests of the Serb intelligentsia. During the debate on the national minority law of 1868, Mileti∆ expressed his disappointment with the restrictions placed on minorities, including the lack of legal remedies and of the use of the national language. He claimed that “the cream of our intelligentsia, the best artists and the most distinguished and prominent thinkers and politicians are forced to desert their own nations in order to make a career in any field of public life from literature to politics”.6 He felt that the assurance of equal individual rights without collective national rights was not only unsatisfactory and insufficient, but also dangerous: since assimilation was the only means of ascent up the social ladder and to individual prosperity, national minority intellectuals would become alienated from their original nation. Similar to their Hungarian counterparts, the Serb liberals—including Mileti∆ himself—thought that the intellectuals’ national commitment was very important. They believed that the presence of a strong national middle-class intelligentsia was crucial from the point of view of the nation’s survival. At the inception of the Omladina, an organization established to assert and strengthen national identity and solidarity and to nourish Serb culture and its basic values, Mileti∆ laid down a strict behavioral code that every national intellectual should comply with. He claimed that the main requirement for an intellectual was to serve his nation, even at the expense of sacrificing his individual wealth and wellbeing, and warned them “not to sink into the gutter of nineteenth-century materialism”.7 He wanted to widen the scope of individual rights on the one hand, and weaken the citizenship allegiance on the other hand to support the Serb national issue. In this way it would have been possible for Serbs living under the Monarchy to provide direct individual support to their compatriots in the Principality of Serbia in order to liberate them from the Turkish yoke.8 The religious activity of the Serb liberals had a lot to do with the question of the social carreer of the Serb intellectuals. This activity had nothing to do with dogmatic anticlericalism or cultural warfare; their aim was a very practical one. They simply wanted to make the religiousnational congress, the only legal Serb organization in Hungary, stronger and more closely integrated with the national movement. Despite its name, this organization was not purely religious; it also accepted secular members. In the 1860s, Mileti∆ strove to secularize the institution further with a view to promoting the development of a new, more secular

6

Kemény, 1952, p. 156. Mileti∆, 1866; in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 101–108. 8 Mileti∆, 1869a; in Jerkov, 1939, p. 146. 7

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and liberal-minded leadership. He wanted this leadership to head the different cultural institutions and foundations, which had previously been controlled by old clerical-military and religious leaders who had served the Habsburg dynasty without hesitation. The liberals did not mean to restrict the power of the Greek Orthodox Church. Quite the contrary: in recognition of its role in the survival of the nation and national culture, they tried to strengthen it as a national institution. The liberals principally criticized the religious hierarchy for its loyalty to the Habsburgs and later to the Hungarian government.9 Another typical feature of the liberal value system was its national characterization and the conclusions it drew from it: a firm insistence on constitutionality was supposed to be the main national characteristics of the Hungarians, while the Serbs could best be characterized by their devoted and unyielding loyalty to their ethnicity. But instead of considering constitutionality as a positive value, the Serb liberals emphasized its negative aspects, claiming that, for the Hungarians, constitutionality meant equality of rights, irrespective of significant national differences. They thought that the Hungarians were ready to accept the assimilation of all other nationalities, a willingness which, in their eyes, showed a lack of national identity and consciousness. In a controversial way, the Serb liberals, for fear of losing their national bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, attacked the Hungarian liberals for something that should rather have been considered positive. This view became so firmly fixed that the Hungarian government’s policy, characterized by a refusal to resort to force, was seen as more dangerous to the Serbs than the overtly hostile and violent Turkish-Ottoman Empire which had suppressed the Serbs for centuries. In contrast to the Hungarian national character, Mileti∆ emphasized the Serbs’ reluctance to assimilate and mingle with other nations as a national virtue.10

4. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Serb liberals tried to amend the nationality law and destroy the dualistic system by following an active policy of opposition in the Parliament. They thought that the maintenance of the Dualism meant the preservation of Hungary’s domination over the nationalities. The alternative was to cooperate with the small national parties, or to woo support from the Hungarian leftist constitutional opposition; but this proved to be relatively unsuccessful. Although the opposition verbally attacked the system of dualism, they

9 10

Mileti∆, 1869b, in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 148–56. Mileti∆, 1868, in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 125–26.

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wanted to retain the integrity of Hungary. Such attempts, and the futility of their efforts to attain national emancipation, were only two of the reasons why they gradually turned away from the dual-centered monarchy. Almost as a logical consequence of their attitude, which was deeply rooted in the principles of natural law, the national emancipation of the Serbs within the Monarchy could not be their ultimate purpose. They had to subordinate this aim to a more important goal, namely, the achievement of an independent nation-state in the principality of Serbia. In the liberals’ eyes it was the mission of all Serbs to fight for the independence of the principality and the foundation of a nation-state, as well as for the unification of all Serbs. In other words, they wanted all Serbs, most of whom lived under Turkish authority, to be liberated and united in a single state. This ‘war of independence’ also had religious implications, since it meant the liberation of Christians from the authority of Muslims. From the 1860s, Mileti∆ went to great lengths to prove in his writings that the national consciousness and identity of the Christian people in the Balkans was strong enough to enable them to establish their own nation-states and defend their own independence.11 He did not believe they would need the help of a Great Power to achieve this goal. At the same time, he criticized the leaders of the Serb principality for not taking steps in this direction during the wars between Austria and Prussia, and later between France and Prussia. He thought this period of crisis in Europe, when all the Great Powers were too busy with their own affairs to interfere, would have been an ideal time for the Serbs to fight their own war against Turkey. These elements dominated his thinking and the policies of his party.12 As far as the post-liberation era was concerned, the Serb liberals had various plans concerning the coexistence of the different Balkan peoples, including confederation. These plans had different versions, but had one element in common: all of them were founded on territorial claims based on historical rights and the unquestionable hegemony of the Serb principality. In this way, they nevertheless neglected to consider a very important fact: these territories were populated by various nationalities, all of whom had substantially different cultural backgrounds.13 During the 1860s and 1870s, most of the small nations in Europe, squeezed between two Great Powers, the Germans and the Russians, were quite skeptical about the possibility of establishing their own independent nation-states. In this context, the Serbian liberals’ program of an independent nation-state was unique and radical. Their confidence

11

Mileti∆, 1863, in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 27–80. Kemény, 1952, pp. 170, 326, 365. 13 Polith–[Desan∑i∆], 1862; and 1865; Orient, Okzident, 1865. 12

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originated partly in the fact that they considered themselves an organic part of a far larger community, the community of the Slavs: “We are Serbs and Slavs at the same time, which means we are members of a divided and scattered nation, the Serbs, but at the same time, we are members of a large race, the Slavs”.14 The practical importance of this credo cannot be overestimated, although even contemporaries considered it more as a theoretical declaration intended to boost the confidence of the Serbs than a feasible program. Most liberals understood how fragile Slav solidarity was. In addition, they were fully aware of the fact that in many cases it might not be the best means of achieving their national goals. It was also in contradiction with their liberal views that the main protector of the Slavs—Russia—had an autocratic, not a constitutional system. Despite these ideological reservations, they hoped to rely on Russia in a potential war against the Turks. The establishment of an independent nation-state seemed urgent for several reasons, stimulated as it was not only by feelings of Slav solidarity—which had dubious value from a practical viewpoint—but also by fear. It was fear that drove Mileti∆ to such extremes, if necessary, demanding revolutionary action to achieve his goal. His main apprehension was that if they did not act in time, there might emerge, either naturally or with the help of the Habsburg Empire, a Southern-Slavic state within the framework of the existing empire. He feared that this state would incorporate those territories in the Balkans which, for the time being, were under Turkish authority, but to which the Serb principality laid claim. This approach explains why the Serb liberals in Hungary were not enthusiastic about the idea of ‘Yugoslavism’, which had been developed by the Croatian liberals as an ideology to unite and integrate all the Southern-Slavic nations in the region. As far as the relationships between the Southern-Slavic nations were concerned, the Serb liberals rejected the idea of a common state: despite all the talk about a Slav community, they stood on the basis of an exclusive Serbism, preferring the notion of a nation-state. A good example of this attitude was the Serb liberals’ failure to support an attempt to emancipate the Slavic nations of the Austrian Empire in the 1860s and 1870s, when the Czech and Croatian liberals made plans to federalize the Habsburg monarchy. They did not establish a common platform with the Austro-Slavic liberals in 1866 either. Hoping that the Serb principality would have more of an opportunity to expand in the Balkans if the Hungarians separated themselves from the Austrians, they supported the Hungarians’ endeavors to gain independence, a strategy which the Austro-Slavic liberals strongly opposed. The most extreme example of Serbian divergence from gener-

14

Mileti∆, 1869a; in Jerkov, 1939, p. 135.

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al Austro-Slavic views came in 1870–71, during the Franco-Prussian War, and later, after German unification, within the framework of the attempt by the Slavic nations of the Habsburg Empire to federalize the monarchy (see above), when the Serb liberals did not put forward any constructive plan to reform its inner structure. The possibility of German unification, or even the establishment of a Greater Germany, was not as threatening for the Serb liberals in Hungary as it was for the Slavic nations of the Habsburg Monarchy: for the Serb liberals, German unification symbolized the victory of the national principle. In addition, they hoped that the unification of the Germans would result in the weakening of the two great multi-national empires: with the relative powers of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire reduced, nothing could prevent the Serbs from unifying. Mileti∆ was so confident about this possibility that in one of his articles in the autumn of 1870 he called the Habsburg Empire an empty concept without real meaning. He was certain that the Austro-Germans, following their natural demands, would join the new German nation-state as soon as possible, thus eliminating any legal ground for the empire’s continued existence. He was convinced that it could not happen in any other way and that this would be the only just and modern solution to the problem. Consequently, when in December 1870 the Ljubljana Conference, dominated by Croatian and Slovenian delegates, called for the unification of the Southern-Slavic nations, but within the framework of the monarchy, Mileti∆ rejected the idea: this would provide an opportunity, he thought, for the Austrians, who had lost their influence in Germany, to expand in the Balkans. The Czechs and the Slovenes, who were terrified of the possibility of being annexed by the Germans, sought to rely on the monarchy and remain within its boundaries. Mileti∆ strongly opposed this—in his opinion, the constitutional agreement of national interests in the region was impossible within the framework of the monarchy, and both the Czechs and the Slovenes should place more trust in the Slavic community, which could defend them more effectively. He hoped that the weakened position of Austria and the revolutionary changes in the Balkans would open up new possibilities for the emancipation of the Serbs and the unification of the Southern-Slavic nations.15 Despite Serbian hopes, German unification left the political and state structure of the Central and Eastern European region intact. The Austrian and Hungarian liberals’ opposition frustrated the Slavic plan of federation and the monarchy continued as a dualistic system. The only

15

Mileti∆, 1870a; in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 171–78; 1870b; in Jerkov, 1939, pp. 17 9–90.

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way the Serbian liberals in Hungary could keep the cause of emancipation and unification alive was continually to raise issues in the Parliament and to organize what turned out to be an unsuccessful revolution.16 From the mid-1870s, Hungarian state policy became more and more repressive, making Serb participation in the Parliament increasingly difficult. The seriousness of the situation can well be demonstrated by the fact that during this period Mileti∆ was imprisoned twice. Another sign of aggravating government oppression was that, during the two decades following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, the number of Serbian liberal representatives diminished from six to just one or two. There was another factor that made the Serb liberals’ fight for the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and for collective national rights more difficult. As a result of capitalist development in Hungary, the Serbian community itself had became polarized: the landowning aristocracy and the Serb bourgeoisie, which had benefited most from the prosperity of economic liberalism in Hungary among the Serbs, were satisfied with the autonomy of Serbian cultural institutions, and genuinely believed that the nationality law would be implemented in the near future. A small stratum of Serbian property owners, who became more and more dominant from the 1880s, gave up the traditional liberal attitude and tried to carve out successes for themselves through cooperation or even integration with the Hungarian liberal government.17 At this time there was another ideological group that threatened the position of the traditional liberal trend—this group espoused radical ideas on both national and social issues, and was convinced that the two were inextricably linked. As a result of all these tendencies, from the middle of the 1880s the traditional, constitutional version of national liberalism lost its decisive role in the Serb community in Hungary. Nevertheless, the crucial issue of emancipation was still unresolved.

III. 1. The genesis and development of liberalism in the Serb principality and in the Serb part of Hungary occurred almost simultaneously, and we can draw many parallels between the two processes. This is not surprising, since the Serbs, although separated by the Danube and a state border, lived in close cultural and scientific symbiosis. A good example of this close relationship and the openness and cooperation between the Serbs in the two states was demonstrated in 1870, when Vladimir 16 17

Vojvodi∆, 1968, pp. 304–15. Mitrovi∆, 1983, pp. 536–41.

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Jovanovi∆ drafted a Political Dictionary which was basically an encyclopedic summary of liberal ideas. The Dictionary was first published in Újvidék (Novi Sad), and written to popularize liberal ideas. It was considered the most ambitious and thorough liberal undertaking of the time, becoming the ‘Bible’ for a new generation of liberal thinkers who started their careers in the mid-1860s. The most typical characteristics of the so-called Omladina generation were that most of them had had a good foreign schooling (usually in Western Europe) and were all agreed on the need for the Serbs, who were scattered in four different states, to unite. Jovanovi∆’s book provided them with the necessary romantic-liberal and messianic ideology. Unification, development, and Balkan hegemony: these were the most decisive elements of this philosophy, which seemed exaggeratedly heroic, given the size of the Serb nation. To justify these national purposes, Jovanovi∆ resorted to the Western type of liberalism, but wanted to adopt only those elements which were appropriate to the Balkan situation. Although his liberalism changed significantly over time, his philosophy had always been centered around the concept of the ‘nation’. The effect of historical developments on his views may be demonstrated by the titles of his writings from different periods of time: The Base of the Power and Greatness of the Serbs was published in 1870 in Újvidék (Novi Sad), and sought to interpret Serb history from a liberal point of view. The treatise, The Struggle for Life in Society and between the Nations, was published under the protection of the Serb Scientific Society in Belgrade fifteen years later, when he was a well-known, respected, and officially accepted writer. Jovanovi∆’s life and political career are inseparable from the history of Serb liberalism. His first important public appearance was at the national assembly in 1858, when it overthrew the autocratic power of Karad-ord-evi∆. This was the first time that the liberals had acted as an independent political group. They demanded the restriction of the prince’s power, the establishment of governmental rule, and the codification of human rights both in the civil and in the economic spheres. Jovanovi∆ was also deeply involved when the liberals first wavered and gave up much of their original program and principles, accepting the autocracy of the Obrenovi∆ princes, who were restored to power at the request of the national assembly. The liberals were convinced that the most efficient way of achieving their ultimate goals of liberating the Serb territories from Ottoman oppression and establishing an independent state was to have a prestigious dynasty and a strong, centralized power in the principality. They were to be disappointed. When they realized that, as things stood, their national purpose looked likely to remain unfulfilled, they went into opposition. At the beginning of the 1860s most of them gave up their political careers and sought

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employment with different literary and scientific societies where they could air their critical views without restriction. Some left the country and went into exile. Jovanovi∆, for example, first went to Geneva and launched a liberal Serbian newspaper. Later he moved to Hungary, where he contributed to Mileti∆’s paper Zastava. In his articles he harshly criticized the social and political conditions of the Serb principality, where there were no democratic institutions, constitutional or representative system, or freedom of the press.18 The system of enlightened autocracy came to an end when a successful coup was organized against the reigning prince. The council that took over responsibility, the regency cabinet, soon adopted a new constitution, and, with the help of the liberals, succeeded in calming the situation and creating governmental stability in the country. The Basic Law of 1869 declared Serbia to be a constitutional monarchy, although the monarch and the executive power continued to be more dominant than the legislative power. “The road to liberty is paved with moderation and not extremes,”19 wrote Jovan Risti∆, one of the most important initiators of progressive changes in politics. Risti∆, the confidential advisor of the reigning prince during the previous regime, had become an ardent political reformer. This political moderation manifested itself in several ways. The government was not fully accountable to the Parliament, the national assembly had restricted control over the budget, and the autonomy of local government remained fairly limited. Although, according to the new constitution, every taxpaying citizen was entitled to vote, one quarter of the members of parliament were appointed by the reigning prince. The constitution contained all the classic civil rights, but the statutes that would have been necessary to realize these rights were only party introduced during the ten-year rule of the liberal government. The reform of the political sphere remained partial, mainly due to the disorganization, factionalization, and consequent paralysis of the liberal movement. At this time the movement was far from having even the elements of a party structure. Ironically, it was only at the beginning of the 1880s, when they lost their position in the government, that they started to organize themselves as a party and to work out a detailed party program. Nevertheless, their gradual disintegration was due more to objective circumstances and world politics than to internal divisions. Between 1875 and 1878 there was a massive crisis in the East which did not leave the movement unaffected. The most important destructive factor affecting their unity was the failure of their national revolu-

18

∂ubrilovi∆, 1958, pp. 245–55; Mili∑evi∆, 1964, pp. 74–136; Stojkovi∆ and Mili∑evi∆, 1969, pp. 265–76; Stokes, 1975, pp. 3–33. 19 Stojan∑evi∆, 1980, pp. 332–40.

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tion, which ended in the occupation of Serbia by Austro-Hungarian troops. This aborted uprising, which made the unification of the Serbs impossible for a long time, decided the future of the liberal movement. Jovanovi∆ took an active part in politics under the liberal government. He held high-ranking senior civil service positions in different ministries, and was finance minister for about five years. According to many political scientists, he was not an original thinker; he interpreted the ideas of different ideologists in quite an eclectic way. The tenets of the organic sociological school, especially Spencer’s theory of evolution, had a strong influence on his work, particularly in those parts where he tried to understand and explain the laws of social development. When analyzing different social phenomena, he often used the methods of geographical determination. In a later period of his career he started to apply the laws of nature to explain social and national conditions, relationships, and phenomena. Although positivism affected his thinking to a large extent, the views of a range of secondary interpreters of liberalism left a more enduring mark on his philosophy than original positivist thinkers did.20

2. From the beginning of the 1860s, Jovanovi∆’s main concern was to work out the theoretical foundations of the constitutional liberal state, and to discover the laws and regularities of social and economic development. As far as the future and the rise of the Serb nation was concerned, he was optimistic, an optimism which originated in his unquestioned scientism. He was convinced that “with the help of truth and science” the nation of the Serbs would soon be able to join the mainstream of European civilization. He thought that no social progress was possible in Serbia without adopting the whole institutional system of liberalism. In his opinion, the liberty of the political and state sphere was an indispensable precondition of bringing economic underdevelopment to an end, developing a cultured society, harmonizing the interests of the different social strata, and creating social balance. Jovanovi∆ claimed that an ideal nation-state must be based on the principles of liberal democracy, that is, it must accomplish equality of rights without any restrictions, and must guarantee the achievement of the two most important princi-

20

There were three philosophers whose theories especially influenced Jovanovic’s thinking: the German Karl Rau, particularly his theory of the importance of state institutions; Wilhelm Roscher, whose historical methods he often used in his writings; and the Frenchman Frederic Bastiat, whose theory of harmony had a deep impact on Jovanovi∆. See Stokes, 1975, pp. 35–40.

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ples of the modern age: liberty and nationality. When he wrote about the requirement of liberty, he had two different aspects of it in mind: (i) liberty as a socio-political category, the right of the individual to influence public affairs through the system of representation; and (ii) liberty as the individual’s personal right. The best mode of representation, he thought, was to give all citizens electoral rights and without restrictions. According to Jovanovi∆’s philosophy, the state must work upon the basis of social utility, which can best be achieved if people have effective representation in the political sphere. Free elections, popular representation, and a government that is fully accountable to the Parliament: these are the basic institutions of a democratic state structure. If this is accompanied by autonomy of local government, we can say that the state has fulfilled its most important function, namely, the representation of the people’s sovereignty. Apart from this strictly socio-political interpretation of individual liberty, Jovanovi∆ emphasized the importance of such rights as the security of personal property, equality before the courts, and free assembly. At the same time, he fought for freedom of the press and religion, the emancipation of women, and the separation of Church and State.21 Jovanovi∆’s theoretical approach was in full accord with the general ideas of democratic liberalism. The real challenge for the Serb liberals was not how to furnish a program, but rather from whom to gain support and how to find the social strata and groups who could help them realize this program of radical social and institutional change. In the 1860s the ruling oligarchy and the administrative bureaucracy of the principality were generally against liberal reforms. At the same time, it was clear to Jovanovi∆ that without a number of educated, morally responsible and financially independent individuals it would be impossible to make the liberal state and its institutions work. He was aware of the fact that the existence of many poor and uneducated citizens could only contribute to the country’s drift to the verge of anarchy. In economic terms, in the middle of the century Serbia was an underdeveloped country in which the capitalization of agriculture and peasant landholdings had just begun and industry did not exist at all. As a result of these backward conditions, the strata from which liberalism usually drew its supporters were lacking in Serbia. There was no propertyowning bourgeoisie, no landed nobility, and no intelligentsia (which in Central and Eastern Europe typically originated from the landed nobility). In Serbia, liberal views were supported only by a very restricted group of the trading bourgeoisie and the humanist intelligentsia. Serb society was basically agricultural: the majority of the population worked

21

Stojkovi∆, 1972, pp. 60–64.

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on the land, and agrarian interests played a decisive part in Serb political life. At the 1858 National Assembly, where the liberals first came up with an independent program, two-thirds of the representatives were peasants or village shopkeepers—even in the typically highly urban profession of trade, in Serbia rural tradesmen significantly outnumbered their urban counterparts. Even two decades later, rural representatives, especially if we include village priests, were in the overwhelming majority in the Serb parliament (Skup≥tina) in Belgrade.22 It is therefore understandable that Jovanovi∆, when outlining his liberal theory, had two groups in mind: (i) the elite, intellectual group of the liberal Young Serbs, and (ii) the village communities. The Young Serbs, who played an important part in Serb cultural life, especially in literature and the press, could function almost as a pressure group and helped to make liberal ideas more popular. Since their organization was established in Hungary and most of its members lived there, however, they could not directly influence the political life of the principality. Due to increasing dissension within the movement from the end of the 1860s, liberalism in Serbia became even less effective. In recognition of the class divisions of Serbian society, the socialist wing of the movement, led by Svetozar Markovi∆, put more stress on general social change than on liberal reform of the state and institutional system. At the same time, Markovi∆ criticized Jovanovi∆, who refused to accept revolution as a real solution, and accused him of Greater Serbian chauvinism.23 At the beginning of the 1870s, as a result of dissent over social issues and pressure from the Hungarian government, the Omladina, the organization of the United Serb Youths, also disintegrated. Jovanovi∆ was convinced that Serb society was suitable for the development of liberal institutions, and he aired this conviction in several of his writings. In The Base of the Power and Greatness of the Serbs he summarized all his previous ideas on the topic. This treatise pursued another line of thought, the historical legitimization of the liberal concept of the state. The article was first published in Mlada Srbadija (Young Serbs) (an arts and sciences review of the Young Serbs, launched in Újvidék [Novi Sad] in 1870), which showed clearly that his writings had a definite ideological purpose. In his article, Jovanovi∆ aimed to demonstrate the existence and continuity of particular liberal values and institutions in the history of the Serbs, despite the fact that the Serb state had had a disorderly history, to say the least. The main ingredient of this idealized and romanticized historical heritage was an inherent democracy, allegedly the most typical national characteristic of the Serbs, which had remained uncorrupted over the centuries. Jovanovi∆ had a romantic picture of the 22 23

Mili∑evi∆, 1964, pp. 209–11. Stojkovi∆ and Mili∑evi∆, 1969, pp. 278–81.

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Middle Ages in Serbia, and claimed that the basic values of national spirit and democratic decision-making originated at that time. According to Jovanovi∆, the main conveyer and preserver of these values during the long centuries of Turkish oppression in the Middle Ages in Serbia was the Orthodox Church and the village community. “Churches and cloisters were the real homes of national consciousness at that time”, said Jovanovi∆. “Ordinary people all over the country gathered around the church or the cloister at the meetings they organized. They were the main forces which guarded the light of reason and national spirit in the dark centuries of oppression. They gave the guidelines on every important issue and they had the spiritual power to control the soul of the nation. The altar and the guzla, faith and nationality, divine and human made an alliance to serve justice and honesty.”24 Jovanovi∆ used this method of historical reasoning to explain why he considered the Orthodox Church and the village community to be the social base of liberal ideas. He was convinced that social development could be achieved only through the alliance of “the altar and the guzla” and modern science. He considered the village community as an ideal form of human coexistence. In his opinion this was the only way of living that was in accordance with the liberal requirements of social balance and harmony. Jovanovi∆ overestimated the real role and importance of the village community, which he considered as an absolute value. Actually, the village community was not without contradictions as far as the relationship between community and individual was concerned, and that it was not quite adequate for a modern society. In Jovanovi∆’s interpretation, the social function of liberalism in Serbia was less the individualization of a patriarchal and agrarian society than the conservation of the traditional village communities.25 According to this ‘patriarchal liberalism’, the freedom of the individual was also a matter of community: rather than being the self-realization of the individual, freedom could be realized only within the boundaries of and in accordance with a social group or national community.

3. Only when the tenets of liberalism became more popular and well known in Serbia did the primacy of the nation-state become more accepted in political thinking, with the romantic idea of a great, united Slavic empire assuming only secondary importance. The other ideology that helped to establish the notion of the nation-state in Serbia was the evolutionist theory of the positivists, with which they sought to justify their demand 24 25

Mlada Srbadija (15 July 1870): 161. Jovanovi∆, 1868, p. 183.

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for unification.26 But to achieve unification, the state needed proper institutions and above all a free hand in foreign policy, both of which were painfully missing in the principality. But, despite the state’s restitution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had never become completely independent in Serbia. The last Turkish garrison troops left Belgrade castle in 1867, but the legitimacy of the Serb monarch was still subject to the approval of the Turkish berat. The Serb liberals’ idealized picture of the Middle Ages served, in a way, to compensate for the weakness of their state. On the one hand, it was intended as historical justification of their rightful demands for territories and this claim served Serbs’ aims for a regional leading role; on the other hand, it furnished an ideology within the framework of which the Serb nation could fulfill its mission of liberating the Christians in the Balkans from the oppression of the Turks. In the 1860s, Jovanovi∆ was convinced that the constitutional democracies of Western Europe would support the Serbs in their efforts towards unification. This supposition was based on the hypothetical spiritual and ideological community he assumed existed between these Western cultures and Serbia. According to the same logic, he considered the absolutist, anti-liberal powers—especially the Prussian militaristic and the Russian despotic systems—to be the enemies of Serbia and of national freedom generally. He believed that liberal solidarity and freedom must be the main principle in international relationships. “Blood relationships, which unite related tribes into a nation and related nations into a race, is one of the strongest bonds between people; even stronger[, however,] is the bond that thoughts and beliefs, reason and knowledge, mutual needs and interests make between them. But the strongest bond is the bond of liberty, this universal value which brings all people together and unites them into a big family”.27 Jovanovi∆’s theory was a typical Slav philosophy in a number of respects, especially the manner in which he used the arguments of biological evolution in his messianic approach. He thought that instead of the old, depleted, and declining nations, it would be the fresh and energetic Slav nations who would play the leading part in the fight for freedom in Europe.28 The most important piece that Jovanovi∆ wrote on the problems of national transformation—The Serbs and the Mission of the Serb Nation in East Europe—was published in Paris in 1870. It was in this work that he first used scholarly arguments to justify the establishment of a Greater Serbia in the Balkans. And yet, this liberal version of the program of a Greater Serbia did not

26

Jovanovi∆, 1867b; Stojkovi∆, 1972, p. 53. Jovanovi∆, 1867a. 28 Jovanovi∆, 1868, p. 13. 27

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contain even the smallest element of aggression. Although the program of reconstructing the status of the area in accordance with national principles was aimed at unifying the Serb nation—which was scattered across the Balkans—the ultimate objective was more ambitious. The Serb liberals wanted more than a homogeneous or separate nation-state; they aspired to become the leaders of all Christian nations in the Balkans, depicting themselves as the leaders of a confederation uniting the liberated, freely organized Christian states, which would achieve freedom with or without the active help of the Serbs.29 There was a crucial oversight in this program: it completely ignored the presence and needs of the Muslims of the region, whom the Serbs traditionally stigmatized as a people incapable of development. The other defect of the program was that it did not take the complexity of the region’s national issues into consideration. Nevertheless, as in so many other instances, history did not progress in accordance with the ideas of theoreticians. The liberal dream of a free alliance of all Balkan nations was never realized. After several abortive uprisings, the Balkans became a helpless object of the superpowers, which arbitrarily decided their fate after the 1877–78 Russian–Turkish wars. The failure of a proper national transformation of the area also resulted in the transformation of Jovanovi∆’s theory. In the 1880s he adapted the theory of the survival of the fittest and natural selection— in a somewhat mechanical fashion—to national and international relationships. In the end, the only bases on which he could imagine national alliances were those organized on racial relationships: this represented nothing less than the theoretical justification of Pan-Slavism. As for future developments, Jovanovi∆ was morally committed to a peaceful version of the theory, hoping that in the social and international survival of the fittest, instead of physical force, economic and cultural superiority would be the decisive factor.30 One of the reasons why Serb liberals became more aggressive and started to use national–Darwinian arguments at the end of the nineteenth century was that they had been through a number of shocking experiences in their continuous fight for national freedom. On the one hand, they had suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, which the whole liberal community in Europe believed had been in irreversible decline for many years. On the other hand, they had had to cope with the moral consequences of the damage that the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina had caused

29

Jovanovi∆, 1870b; I refer to the abridged version of the essay published in Zastava (26 July 1870 and 12 August 1870). 30 Jovanovi∆, 1885, pp. 210–33.

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to their national identity. This kind of liberalism, which considered racial struggle to be the basic force in human development, could not offer a real solution for the complex nationality problems of Central and Eastern Europe. The circle had closed. A state of deterrence and intimidation, together with feelings of frustration, created a spiritual atmosphere in Serbia at the end of the century that made it very difficult to rethink the true values of liberalism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ∂ubrilovi∆, Vasa. 1958. Istorija politike misli u Srbiji XIX. veka. Belgrade: Prosveta. Haselsteiner, Horst. 1976. Die Serben und der Ausgleich. Zur politischen und staatsrechtlichen Stellung der Serben Südungarns in den Jahren 1860-1867. Vienna– Köln–Graz: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf. Wiener Archiv für Geschichte des Slawentums und Osteuropas, Band IX. Jerkov, Miroslav, ed. 1939. Izbrani ∑lanci Svetozara Mileti∆a. Novi Sad: ≤tamparija Jovanovi∆ i Bogdanov. Izdanja prosvetno-izdava∑ke zadruge “Zmaj.” Broj 1. Jovanovi∆, Milo≥. 1983. ‘Filozofski i pravni osnovi politi∑ke misli Svetozara Mileti∆a’, in ed. Milisavac, ∏ivan and Nikola Petrovi∆, Kulturno-politi∑ki pokreti naroda habsbur≥ke monarhije u XIX veku. Zbornik radova. Novi Sad: Matica srpska. Jovanovi∆, Vladimir. 1867a. ‘Savez sila,’ in Zastava, no. 2, (4 January). ———. 1867b. ‘Na≥ narodni poloπaj,’ in Zastava, no. 90. (28 September). ———. 1868. Za slobodu i narod. Novi Sad: Platonova ≥tamparija. ———. 1870a. ‘Osnovi snage i veli∑ine srbske,’ in Mlada Srbadija, no. 1–3. ———. 1870b. Les Serbes et la mission de la Serbie dans l'Europe d'orient. Paris: Librairie Internationale. ———. 1885. ‘Dru≥tvena i med-unarodna borba za opstanak,’ in Glasnik Srbskog u∑enog Dru≥tva. Vol. 60. Kemény, G. Gábor. 1952. Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez Magyarországon a dualizmus korában. I. 1867–1892. Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó. Mileti∆, Svetozar. 1863. ‘Isto∑no pitanje’ (published in Srbski Dnevnik, no. 174, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 184–5, 186), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1866. ‘Zna∑aj i zadatak Srpske omladine’ (published in Zastava, no. 46), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1868. ‘Srbi i Mad-ari’ (published in Zastava, no. 53), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1869a. ‘Osnova programa za srpsku liberalno-oppozicionu stranku’ (published in Zastava), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1869b. ‘Sveti Sava, na≥ klir i na≥ narod’ (published in Zastava, no. 6), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1870a. ‘Jedinstvo juπnih Slavena’ (published in Zastava, no. 142), in Jerkov (1939). ———. 1870b. ‘Jos jedanput o jedinstvu Juπnih Slavena’ (published in Zastava, no. 149), in Jerkov (1939).

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Mili∑evi∆, Jovan. 1964. Jevrem Gruji∆: Istorijat Svetoandrejskog liberalizma. Belgrade: Nolit. Biblioteka Portreti 35. Mitrovi∆, Andrej, ed. 1983. Istorija Srpskog naroda. VI/1. tom. Od Berlinskog Kongressa do Ujedinenja 1878-1918. Belgrade: Srpska knjiπevna zadruga. n.a. 1865. Orient, Okzident und der Panslavismus. Pest. Petrovi∆, Nikola. 1958. Svetozar Mileti∆. Belgrade: Nolit. Biblioteka Portreti 12. ———, ed. 1968. Svetozar Mileti∆ i narodna stranka. Gradja 1860–1885. Vol. I–II. 1860–1875. Sremski Karlovci: Istorijski Arhiv Autonomne Pokrajine Vojvodine. Polith-[Desan∑i∆], Michael [Mihailo]. 1862. Die orientalische Frage und ihre organische Lösung. Vienna: Franz Leo's Verlagsexpedition. ———. 1865. Die Serben und die orientalische Frage. Von einem Serben. Bautzen: Schmaler & Pech. Radeni∆, Andrija. 1983. Az 1848–1849-es szerb mozgalom alapkérdései. in ed. Bona, Gábor, Szerbek és magyarok a Duna mentén. Tanulmányok a szerb–magyar kapcsolatok körébôl (1848–1849). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 94–134. Spira, György. 1980. A nemzetiségi kérdés a negyvennyolcas forradalom Magyarországán. Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. Stojan∑evi∆, Vladimir, ed. 1981. Istorija srpskog naroda. Od Prvog Ustanka do Berlinskog Kongresa 1804–1878. V/1. Belgrade: Srpska knjiπevna zadruga. Stojkovi∆, Andrija and Jovan Mili∑evi∆. 1969. ‘Omladinski i liberalski ideolog Vladimir Jovanovi∆,’ in Savremenik. Stojkovi∆, Andrija B. 1972. ‘Dru≥tveno-politi∑ki pogledi Vladimira Jovanovi∆a’ Jugoslovenski istorijski ∑asopis, 60–64. Stokes, Gale. 1975. Legitimacy through Liberalism (Vladimir Jovanovi∆ and the Transformation of Serbian Politics). Seattle, London: University of Washington Press. Publications on Russia and Eastern Europe of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, No. 5. Thim, József . 1930–1940. A magyarországi 1848-1849-iki szerb fölkelés története. 3 vols. Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat. Vojvodi∆, Vasa. 1968. ‘Ujedinjena omladina srpska i pripremanje ustanka na Balkanu 1871-1872, in ed. Milisavac, ∏ivan, Ujedinjena omladina srpska. Zbornik radova. Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 304–315.

Building the State from the Roof Down Varieties of Romanian Liberal Nationalism DANIEL BARBU – CRISTIAN PREDA

One must first understand that there is no way to measure Romanian Liberal Nationalism. The topic is far too vast, and has been shaped by numerous political forms. It is a notion that extends across different parts of Romanian modern and recent history. This essay focuses on two of these areas.1 Chronologically, they are discontinuous; logically, the second flows from the first. Both areas were sparked by revolution. The first Romanian liberalism was triggered by the Revolution of 1848 and prevailed until the end of World War I, as the major agency of nationbuilding and modernization. The second Romanian liberalism was spurred by the Revolution of 1989 and is still linked to the process of democratization and institutional design. The National Liberal Party was created in 1875, but various radical and liberal factions were already the driving force behind the unification of the Romanian Principalities in 1859. The same factions fomented the coup against Prince Cuza in 1866, offered the crown to a foreign dynasty, and wrote the Constitution of 1866. Inspired by the Belgian model and amended several times, the Constitution lasted until 1938. A liberal government sent the Romanian army to fight successfully in the Russian–Turkish War of 1877, proclaimed the independence of the country, and negotiated its full recognition at the Congress of Berlin one year later. Other liberal governments gave their unremitting support to the Romanian national movement in Transylvania, and established a Central Bank and a national credit system. They also crushed the bloody peasant uprising of 1907. Finally, another liberal government overturned the alliance with the Central Powers, an alliance concluded by the Crown and backed by the Conservatives. This same liberal government took the French and English side in the Great War, while resisting the German and Austro-Hungarian invasion. It eventually

1

The first part of this essay was written by Daniel Barbu and the second part by Cristian Preda.

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aggrandized the Kingdom of Romania by bringing the Western provinces of Transylvania and Banat into the nation, introducing universal suffrage and setting in motion agrarian reform. From 1866 to 1919, helped by an electoral system based on limited representation, the Liberals held the reigns of the government twenty one times, being in charge of the country for 38 years. From the making of Greater Romania in 1918 to its disbanding by the communist regime in 1948, the National Liberal Party was, politically, the living dead.2 In one eleven-year strech during this period, six liberal governments were in power. One such government reshuffled most of the public institutions and tailored the Constitution in 1923, in order to acknowledge the territorial and political transformation brought forth by World War I. In 1926, the same government introduced a fascist-style electoral law that repealed any democratic measures universal suffrage might have promised. Another liberal government was even credited with the economic boom of 1934–1938. However, both governments were liberal only in name; in fact, their policies were anti-liberal. Whenever it was called on to form a government, the National Liberal Party promoted protectionism, faked elections, suspended civil rights, dissolved associations, repressed the opposition, silenced the press, and evaded any parliamentary control. Ultimately, the Party apparatus and most of its leadership were instrumental in the reversal of representative democracy under King Carol II in 1938. Furthermore, since the peace treaties of Paris accomplished the national ideal that the former generations of Liberals had stood for, the Party abandoned any form of nationalism in the hands of right-wing political groups. For the Liberals of the 1920s and 1930s, the nation was definitively realized and they saw no political stake in the matter. This is precisely the reason why the present authors have decided not to address this period. Instead, a high concentration of events that involved a re-emerged liberal party and a born-again liberal ideology may be observed after the Revolution of 1989. The Constitution of December 1991 was shaped and adopted under a coalition government in which Liberals had a significant share. They also had influence in the drafting and enforcement of the electoral laws of 1992, which are still in use today with only slight amendments. After the association of Romania with the European Union in 1995, the first chief negotiator—appointed in 2000—was a Liberal. The Party was particularly effective in imposing the Atlantic alliance as the most important strategic choice for Romania. This sec-

2

A useful historical survey of this period in Dumitru ªandru, “Partidul Naµional Liberal în perioada interbelic¥ ºi a celui de-al doilea r¥zboi mondial,” in ªerban R¥dulescu-Zoner, ed. 2000, pp. 201–252.

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ond Romanian Liberalism has an explicit and systematic relationship to the first one. After 1989, Liberals took full advantage of the anticommunist Revolution but embedded their political discourse in a liberal tradition legitimized by the Revolution of 1848. Oftentimes, present day Liberals consider themselves a contemporary embodiment of the first revolutionary generation.

I. The 1876 parliamentary year commenced and was concluded in Romania by an implied agreement of Liberals and Conservatives with respect to the artificial and burdensome character of the state, which they would take turns in running. On January 21, the Conservative Minister of Public Instruction and Religious Affairs, Titu Maiorescu, stated that, under the Organic Regulations (1831–1848), the country was dressed in a public outfit made out of customs that, except for a few “detrimental principles,” were wholly compatible with the administrative requirements of a modern state. Moreover, these customs and regulations had the comparative advantage of not furthering the emergence of political liberty, which was not yet considered desirable by Romanian society. Between the Revolution of 1848 and the Constitution of 1866, Romanians found themselves politically “undressed,” and had to cover themselves up with a new form of state that consisted of a constitutional dress that did not suit them at all.3 A couple of months later, the National Liberal Party formed a new government and called for elections that strengthened the position of its radical wing. On December 15, Prime Minister Ion C. Br¥tianu echoed the statement of the former prime minister, now in opposition, and agreed that, without taking the time to reproduce “the modes of production of a civilized society,” the Romanians “draped” themselves in modern political “clothes” by merely copying the Western “pattern of political organization,” together with the entire legal apparatus that the original blueprint brought along. The leader of the Liberal Party admitted that he deserved to be counted among “the unfortunates” who, during and after the 1848 Revolution, had given the state a “wonderful roof ” but no foundations. During his reign as leader nothing significant had been accomplished because there was no government or political group to boost agriculture, industry, or commerce. Instead, the only significant, if perverse, achievement of the generation that conducted the process of constitutional and legal modernization of the country was the creation of a broad category of professionals of the

3

Maiorescu, 1897, p. 413.

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state, trained to exploit the sole viable and tangible gross national income generated by the peasants’ labor.4 What is surprising about this indirect dialogue is its bi-partisan character, rather than the issue under debate. During the same period (1864– 1884), the Portuguese elite, as peripheral to modernity as the Romanian one, was engaged in similar disputes regarding the balance between a society still attached to the values and customs of the Ancient Regime, and a society that was dramatically liberal and had a progressive transformation of the institutional framework of the government.5 In both Portugal and in Romania, for instance, mandatory primary school education and the abolishment of the death penalty were legal innovations introduced in the absence of any concern for mobilizing resources. These innovations were necessary in order to craft a national elementary school network or create agencies capable of enforcing law and order. Were the Romanian Liberals, like other political elites from the periphery of modern Europe, just “a class of importers”6 facing the difficult assignment of adjusting a form of government and an ideal of political reform, that they learned to admire elsewhere, to a benighted and unyielding traditional society? It seems that the replication and the rapid multiplication of external forms of civilization, inspired by the legacy of the French Revolution and triggered by the events of 1848 failed, at least before 1876, to touch the Romanian social foundations in any significant way, immobilized as they were in a permanent resistance to change. Indeed, Titu Maiorescu famously believed that the “radical vice” of the Romanian culture of the 19th century was the “untruthfulness” 7 of the public life forms—whether they were political, economic, cultural, or of any other nature. These forms, acquired from the West, did not match the inbred “essence” of the Romanian society. Parliament and the Constitution, elections and the free press, the academic world and the public education system, the museums and all the other Westernizing institutions, were all just “pretences with no basis,” “shapeless phantoms,” “illusions without truth,” in short, forms without foundations.8 Maiorescu’s claim was that the Liberals had produced the fruits of modernity without bothering to reproduce their rationale, their “deeper historical fundament.” They merely strove to translate the “appearances of the Western culture,” expecting to achieve freedom, and form a mod4

Br¥tianu, 1912, pp. 107–111. Antonio Costa Pinto, Pedro Tavares de Almeida, “On Liberalism and the Emergence of Civil Society in Portugal,” in Bermeo and Nord, 2000, p. 7. 6 I use the language of Bertrand Badie, 1982, p. 152. 7 Titu Maiorescu, “În contra direcµiei de ast¥zi în cultura român¥,” in Maiorescu, 1967, p. 147. 8 Idem, p. 151. 5

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ern representative regime out of this “outside polish.” 9 But what exactly was the content that did not receive the proper forms, the foundations that refused to cast themselves in the mould of the liberal? Could these societal foundations, the ultimate and unreformed truth of the Romanian body politic, be defined in a positive way? Thus far, we have learned what Romanians were not yet ready for. Reading Titu Maiorescu and Ion C. Br¥tianu, we simply find out that, in its state of authenticity, nineteenth-century Romanian society was incompatible with alien forms like constitutions, universities, modern bureaucracy or credit. Met with ironic skepticism by Maiorescu,10 the first attempt to establish what could have been a definitive truth of Romanian politics is to be found in the Conservative Party program, issued on February 16, 1880, by Manolache Costache Epureanu. For the Conservative leader, the “substance of truth”—to be opposed to the fallacious liberal “wording”—was not, however, an essence, but rather an action: “To observe properly the principles of representative government.” 11 Despite Maiorescu’s historicism and philosophical pessimism, most of the Conservatives and even the majority of the Liberals would have agreed with such an assessment. It seems that in the European peripheral societies in the nineteenth century, where modernity was still overdue and industrialization was late to visit,12 the intellectual juxtapositions between form and foundation, illusion and reality, words and facts, allowed for an artificial polarization of the political actors of the representative regime, between a “red,” liberal and progressive Left and a reactionary, conservative and traditionalist Right. Liberal partisans of natural law and conservative proponents of historicism, in almost complete agreement as to the ways and means of government, could thus express their conflicting views in the press or in Parliament. The purpose of political competition was not to compare the merits of these positions, but to determine which side the symbolic and social benefits of modernization should go. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea noticed, somehow against his Marxian criteria of analysis, that the Romanian elites did not represent particular and competing economic or social interests, but merely protected and promoted the overall interests of a “political industry,” 13 which was developed by a unified oligarchy located in Parliament. According to Ion C. Br¥tianu’s observation of 1876, the civil service itself was but a branch of this industry. 9

Idem, p. 147. Maiorescu, 1899, p. 4. 11 Bulei, 2000, p. 33. 12 Lampe, 1975, pp. 56–85. 13 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, 1978, p. 185. 10

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In this respect, Romania was not so different from nineteenth century Spain, where politics was completely neutral in terms of representing economic interests, and fully convergent in exploiting the state apparatus. Elections were won and lost according to the ability of the parties— embedded in the same social background—to mobilize the resources of the civil service and to set up territorial networks of patronage.14 In the early 1880s, Petre P. Carp described as follows the procedures of electoral mobilization that matched the Spanish ones to the letter: “You would ask me, what does the prefect do? What does he do? Electioneering. What does the permanent committee do? Electioneering. What does the deputy prefect do? Electioneering. What does the mayor do? Electioneering. Our entire administration is nothing but a giant electoral device.” 15 As in neighboring Greece, Romania was under the unquestioned authority of a parliamentary oligarchy. This was because politics was the exclusive trade of a small number of prominent families and associated clientele, organized in parties lacking the will and ability to mass-mobilize and resolved to preserve the censitaire representative system, which qualified and classified voters in conformity with their income.16 Hence, representative government did not represent the citizenry, but the convergence of interests of a cartel of landlords or land leasers (“agricultural industrialists” as they were called in the last two decades of the century) and a conglomerate of urban and rural renters that lived off a double—and sometimes combined—exploitation of land and the public debt. In the Romanian state set up by the Constitution of 1866, this “class of professional politicians” 17 was the result of “a patriotic agreement over the relations of production in agriculture.” 18 The nation-state had to be planned and built from the roof down by political engineers who were recruited from the traditional privileged social strata, with the explicit exclusion of the peasantry from any participation in public life. Undoubtedly, such an approach to politics was anti-Toquevillian, since it intended to make use of the state as the driving force of modernization, and did not consider the involvement any form of civil society in the process. Romanian radicals shared the general compunction of their fellow European Liberals about the right of free association, behind which they saw the potential danger of a democratic and popular mobilization against the liberal state and its parliamentary oligarchy. The Orleanu law of 1909, prohibiting the creation of trade unions and professional 14

Linz, 1981, pp. 367–375. Gane, 1936, p. 333. 16 Mouzelis, 1986, p. 3. 17 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, 1978, p. 178. 18 Idem, pp. 180–181. 15

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associations of employees, and suppressing the right to strike 19 was promoted by a National Liberal government and voted by a Liberal majority. As in Italy,20 equally peripheral to modernity, Romanian Liberals showed no real concern for establishing a constitutional system based on checks and balances and were seduced instead by the idea of a strong government, able to reshape the institutional framework of the polity and to advance gradual social reform. Romanian progressive politicians understood the latter as an incremental “solidarity” between the state and the rural majority through such instruments of self-improvement as generalized education and easy access to credit. Upward social mobility was acceptable, if not desirable, but only as an individual solution. Therefore, corporate interests or political militancy were not deemed legitimate agencies of social promotion. Taking advantage of public instruction and national cheap capital was, by 1900, according to Ionel I. C. Br¥tianu, the only reasonable avenue of political enfranchisement.21 The social philosophy of Romanian liberalism was indeed summarized at the turn of the century by the principle, “By ourselves,” which expressed the trust, shared by most European Liberals,22 in self-help and personal improvement as devices of social advancement. Even the conservative Maiorescu agreed in a private note that the Constitution can also be viewed as “a training school for the people,” which would be encouraged with time “to be mindful of itself,” to mature politically and “to rise above itself by its own merits.” 23 Constitutionalism may be a learning process, but it is hardly a political solution, as it cannot expand the scope of representation in a natural way. In reality, both Liberals and Conservatives interpreted the rules of exclusion engrained into representative government as a fallout of the hierarchy of ranks brought forth by the Organic Regulations. Not surprisingly, Ion C. Br¥tianu emphasized that the post-medieval assemblies of orders, the general assembly of the Organic Regulations, and the legislative body introduced by the Paris Convention and the Statute of 1864 all belonged to an uninterrupted representative tradition. This tradition buttressed “a very liberal regime and, I might say, a parliamentary one” that distinguished the Romanians from other neighboring people, who were condemned in the past to “absolute despotism.” 24 It was precisely this

19

Stan and Iosa, 1996, p. 355. Banti, 2000, pp. 43–44. 21 Discursurile lui I.I.C. Br¥tianu, 1933, p. 249. 22 Allan Mitchell, “Bourgeois Liberalism and Public Health: A Franco–German Comparison,” in Jürgen Kocka, Allan Mitchell, p. 347. 23 Maiorescu, 1937, p. 132. 24 Br¥tianu, 1941, p. 178. 20

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sense of the historical continuity of political representation that slowed the pace of democratization, which was more likely to succeed in societies that shift directly from “despotism” to parliamentarism, as Stein Rokkan argued.25 Everywhere in nineteenth century Europe, the liberal dilemma was determining how to set a political agenda simultaneously distant from both aristocratic privileges and democratic expectations. For their part, Romanian Liberals were more concerned with the necessity of containing any popular taste for electoral democracy that Alexandru Ioan Cuza may have stirred up than by the landowners’ conservatism. The coup d’état of 1866 was thus prepared and enacted by various “red” groups in collusion with most of the reactionary circles. This “monstrous coalition,” as its contemporary critics called it, aimed at restoring the representative logic of 1831, which was threatened by Cuza’s idea of universal suffrage. Additionally, like George III in the first part of his reign,26 the prince previously appointed cabinets of his own choice, thereby ignoring the patronage networks controlled either by radical and moderate liberal factions or by conservative bosses. Hence, the main purpose of the constitutional arrangement of 1866 was to reverse the political consequences of the Paris Convention (1858) and of the Statute imposed in 1864 by Cuza. If the avowed purpose of the Constitution of 1866 was to firmly establish a number of public freedoms, it was also meant to cancel the very possibility of an autonomous peasant electoral constituency that could have influenced the decision-making process. To be sure, in the ad hoc assemblies of 1857, which were highly instrumental in shaping the politics of modernization, peasant deputies consisted of 20% of the membership. Ten years later, the Liberals were still haunted by the memory of peasant deputies speaking on their own behalf and trying to include the rural question on the public agenda. Liberals strongly believed that peasants were not politically qualified to have representatives of their own. Thus, it was the radicals and not the conservative landowners that committed themselves to blocking, on that particular occasion, the issue of landless peasants working on large estates in onerous conditions.27 This was an issue that blanketed Romanian society until land reform was accomplished in the aftermath of World War I. By removing the peasantry from the public sphere in 1866, the parliamentary oligarchy reinforced the social power relations and the social hierarchies established in 1831 by the Organic Regulations. This was

25

Flora, 1999, p. 249. Pocock, 1985, pp. 81–82. 27 Stan and Iosa, 1996, p. 69. 26

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still regarded in 1876 by Titu Maiorescu as a constitutional arrangement entirely compatible with the liberal requirements of representative government. Until universal suffrage was introduced in 1919 the political elite of the country did not undergo any structural changes in terms of recruitment and public career. The four-class electoral system ensured the sway of a few hundred families and their clientele over the Senate and two of the electoral classes entitled to vote for the Lower House of the Parliament. Therefore, the Romanian parliamentary oligarchy followed the logic of a paternalist and authoritarian system of government, which, in the nineteenth century, characterized most post-Byzantine countries entrenched in the Orthodox cultural tradition.28 “Good institutions are the foundation of the very existence of the state. They are the necessary condition for its progress towards civilization and a thriving future.” 29 This statement, taken from a 1832 memorandum on the implementation of the Organic Regulations in Moldavia, uttered a conviction shared by most Romanian politicians during the age of modernization: good institutions, embodied by the bureaucracy of a highly centralized state and kept together by a stable political elite, should be a prerequisite for the progress of a society that was striving to catch up with the present. Representative government rooted in an exclusive système censitaire was by definition the institutional instrument that consolidated a category of professionals of modernization, as liberals used to regard themselves. One of the questions which nation-building, as a process designed and carried out by Romanian Liberals in the second half of the nineteenth century, did not answer was whether the institutions and the legislation of a modern state were able to transform a society of dependent subjects into a community of free citizens. In front of the prince who distributed justice, the boyar who owned the land, and the Church that discouraged both work and knowledge,30 the people of the Ancient Regime could represent themselves only as subjects. The social role imparted to them was to obey anyone who preceded them in the hierarchy of ranks and to command those beneath them. The liberal state replaced this type of obedience with another, whose mechanics of compliance and leadership functioned according to the place assigned to each individual in the institutional geography of representative government. The progressive elite approached modernity with a massive handicap: it was not the social product of the revolution, but rather the offspring of old privileges. Thus “red” politicians, whether they were radicals or moderates,

28

Janos, 2000, pp. 45–48. Georgescu, 1972, p. 37. 30 Barbu, 2001b, pp. 89–134. 29

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were not, as a group, genetically distinct from the Conservatives. The official and gradual abolition of medieval privileges between 1848–1866 transformed the traditional “dominant class” into a modern “ruling class,” to use the language of Gaetano Mosca.31 For the parliamentary oligarchy of the nineteenth century, modernization was first and foremost a problem of political conversion: how to replace a vertical hierarchy of ranks (determined jointly by landowning and by the position held at the Court) with a horizontal aggregate of elites (parliamentary, academic, professional, commercial, landed, and administrative)? The political engines of this transformation were first, the parliamentary factions and, later, the parties themselves. As Petre P. Carp admitted in April 1876, “the essence of the constitutional whirl is the rule of the parties.” 32 The oligarchic party, with a limited and hand picked constituency, became the liberal form of the privileged order of the Ancient Regime. Approaching modernity as a process of institutional design and political conversion, the Liberals exerted themselves while trying to substitute the ancient power relations, marshaled by the Court and underpinned by land ownership, with a method of gouvernementalité,33 whose mission was to replace real estate with the state as their main economic asset. For this reason the Conservatives interpreted the founding of the National Bank in 1880 and the generalization of the instruments of credit as an attack on property, and as a fraudulent and interested devaluation of real estate.34 Almost two hundred years earlier, the establishment of the Bank of England produced the same reaction within Tory circles which were worried by the Whig decision to substitute the real value of land with the nominal value of paper money. This relied solely on the belief in the solvability of the state.35 In short, after 1866 the modern state was, for the Liberals (and the government supported or inspired them), a way to free their pervasive social domination from the dictatorship of the land and to craft a political nation out of illiterate and subjugated peasants. On December 9, 1905, Ion I.C. Br¥tianu outlined in a parliamentary discourse a short history of the party whose president he became three years later: “The National Liberal Party was not born as a spontaneous and theoretical entity, as a mere scholarly conception … The National Liberal Party emerged as the expression of a real and major need of our state and people. It was constantly the agency that fulfilled

31

Mosca, 1982, pp. 608–632, 929–940, 1003–1042. Gane, p. 189. 33 I use the term as explained by Foucault, 1994, pp. 635–657. 34 Stan and Iosa, 1996, pp. 214–217. 35 Pocock, 1985, pp. 196–197. 32

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Romania’s vital necessities and the first need it had to respond to, the one that preceded and encompassed all others, the one from which it took even its national-liberal name, was the need to warrant the national existence of the Romanians.” 36 Here, the nation does not appear to have an explicit ethnic meaning, being regarded rather as a surrogate of citizenship. This explains why the discourse on political capacity, peculiar to nineteenth century European liberalism,37 was relatively inconspicuous in the Romanian liberal milieu. Accordingly, the electoral reform bill of 1884, which reduced the number of electoral classes from four to three and enlarged the electoral body, was presented in the official paper of the party as proof of the liberal trust in the nation, and not as sanctioning the improvement of the level of individual qualification for voting.38 The boyar factions formed around 1800, both in Wallachia and in Moldavia, under the generic name of “national parties” envisioned the nation under the political features provided by the French Revolution. For instance, a memorandum of 1818–1819 mentioned the “national bond” that fiscal equality, brought forth by the abolition of privileges and immunities, could create for all Romanians.39 Accordingly, an anonymous liberal author of the 1830s wrote, “That place where a society of many people is dwelling is called fatherland, because of the name of the fathers and forefathers who lived there as a society. It is not the land that should be called a fatherland, but the political dwelling, that is the society of those who live together, making use of and sharing each other, whose sharing is bound by love and the common interests and purposes … therefore we could not say that Romania is our fatherland, because we haven’t had and we still don’t have here a society that we may share and make use of.” 40 Thus, “fatherland” is not a place charged with the past of an ethnic group, but the “political dwelling” of a society that is experiencing the fullness of civil rights and duties and is marshaled by a sense of the common good. The very term liberalism was imported into Romanian around 1828 by one of the most cogent reformist political thinkers of Moldavia, Ionic¥ T¥utul.41 The pre-revolutionary generations imagined that the nation 36

Bulei, 2000, p. 16. The theoretical inconsistency of Romanian liberalism as assumed by Ion C. Br¥tianu is indirectly confirmed by a somewhat discouraging attempt to find elements of classical liberal thought in Romanian politicians who called themselves liberals: Victoria F. Brown, 1982, pp. 269–301. 37 Kahan, 2003, pp. 5–8. 38 Românul XXVII, April 10, 1883, p. 325. 39 ªotropa, 1976, p. 47. 40 Cornea, 1972, p. 208. 41 Bochmann, 1979, p. 68.

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was a sovereign community with a place of its own in the jus publicum europaeum and would be held together by the mechanics of representation. The proclamation of Islaz of June 9, 1848, which served as a revolutionary constitution for a few months, found that truth, political ideas, and knowledge were universal and could not be subject to any limitation of class, status or ethnicity. According to Ioan D. Negulici, a revolutionary philologist who published immediately after 1848 a dictionary of neologisms to be used as a progressive political lexicon, the liberal was “the protector of humanity and of the rights of the nations.” 42 Political capacity was then deemed by the liberal successors of the Revolution of 1848 to be eminently indivisible and, consequently, something to be taken into account between (and not within) national communities. In a speech of November 22, 1876, I. C. Br¥tianu argued that the holder of political qualification was, or should be, the country itself: if the people are not educated swiftly, the more educated nations would eventually assimilate the Romanians.43 The National Liberal Party, which was created one year earlier, assumed the task of being the political representative of the Romanian nation. When they decided to indefinitely postpone the extension of political rights in 1866—even in the restricted form of an equal vote for all the literate capital or labor owners adopted by other liberal regimes of South-Eastern Europe—the Romanian liberals resorted to an intuitive and natural substitute for citizenship. Thus, in 1891, the Liberals honored the death of Ion C. Br¥tianu with a public declaration emphasizing that the National Liberal Party was nothing else than the “nation’s consciousness.” 44 Ten years later, Constantin Stere defended the collective enrollment of the socialist militants in the liberal organizations, which some considered a political betrayal, with the argument that “only this party will accomplish the ideal of a great Romanian nation, master of its own destiny.”45 Since they were not willing to grant all Romanians political participation, and were jealously sharing the reign of a very restricted representative government with the Conservatives, the Liberals placed democratic citizenship and the national idea in the same idealistic political frame. Only when “Romanian national existence” was achieved (a rather unlikely event before 1918), could universal suffrage be an option. The individual capacity to vote should have been the historical outcome of the definitive qualification of the nation in the international arena.

42

Idem, pp. 141–142. Br¥tianu, 1941, p. 218. 44 Stan and Iosa, 1996, pp. 276. 45 Idem, pp. 333. 43

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By taking away fundamental political rights from the citizens and assigning them to a would-be unified nation, the founders of the modern Romanian state, Liberal and Conservative alike, shaped a Rechtsstaat in which positive laws, not individual rights, were the only guarantees for the preservation and enforcement of public liberties.46 Hence, the individual citizen was not conceived as a natural agent of liberty, but as a subject of a rule of law that granted him that amount of freedom and those rights compatible with the interests of a state embodied by the Liberal–Conservative parliamentary oligarchy. It is only after 1888 that the liberal ideology welcomed, especially in some of Ionel I. C. Br¥tianu’s statements, the idea of a nation composed of rights, and pictured as a community of citizens summoned up by the liberal project of modernization. Therefore, by the turn of the century, the topics of agrarian and electoral reform, of Romanianness, and of democratic citizenship merged into a single liberal discourse close to the model of social nation.47 To sum up, the Romanian liberal elite did not cope with modernization as a social advancement of civil and political rights, but as a mere language of political change. Whereas the bourgeois nineteenth century understood modernity as power over things, Romanian Liberals approached it as a power over words. They were reluctant, or unable, to develop a culture of experience. They instead preferred to wrap themselves in a culture of discourse. “Political matters concern them to the highest degree,” observed Jacques Poumay, consul general of Belgium, in 1867. “For ten years now the Romanians have been writing nothing more than newspaper articles and these articles, when they are not written by personalities, develop but empty theories, lacking the sanction of experience.” 48 If this was the case, was modernization more than simply a name given to the spontaneous economic, societal, institutional, and intellectual transformations that occurred in Romania after the Revolution of 1848? It seems that modernization, as a more or less delayed, but constant project of Romanian political elites, was not just a process that directed the life and work of a backward society to the future. Modernization also included those sets of behaviors, attitudes, practices and words whose significance was never contemporary, but was fed by meanings that preceded it.49 In other words, the path followed by Romania in the nineteenth century was not only determined by the revolutionary 46

Vs. Schmitt, 1993, p. 130. A similar evolution, yet marked by an explicit English liberal positivism, took place in Poland. Porter, 1996, pp. 1470–1492, and especially pp. 1470–1473. 48 Stan, 1992, pp. 1200–1201. 49 Barbu, 2001a, pp. 62–67. 47

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breakthrough of 1848, but also by the economic, political and cultural practices the Revolution stood against. Somehow, the political idiom of Romanian elites was trapped between this invasive past and a future they were unprepared to tackle. As soon as it was gradually included in the public discourse, national history became more an argument for the present than the shared scholarly memory of a common past. For instance, Titu Maiorescu, uttered his parliamentary speeches facing the past: in his capacity as legislator and minister, he claimed he was actually doing “contemporary history,” 50 not politics. For their part, Liberals also learned that politics might be a useful anticipation of the past. Hence, the failure of the Revolution of 1848 became history. When writing in 1850 Românii supt Mihai Voevod Viteazul, the then exiled Nicolae B¥lcescu wrote contemporary history, trying to bestow on the Revolution the past it was missing. The official Romanian historiography of the twentieth century regards Michael the Brave as the eminent unifier of the ethnic nation, and a herald of the creation of Greater Romania in 1918. For B¥lcescu, the prince of 1600 was a retrospective liberal hero who “by himself,” and against all odds, attempted to lay the foundation of a political society out of dispersed and conflicting elements. A long national history of social and political subjection was no longer viewed as being discordant with liberal values, but as the epic project of a political nation. After 1848, history was the continuous presence 51 of liberal politics. Taking as milestones the Organic Regulations, the Revolution of 1848, and Cuza’s authoritarian regime, the interpretation of recent history espoused by the parliamentary oligarchy was, probably, nothing more than a method to avoid facing a basic dilemma: how could a modern and liberal state embed itself in a society not made up of Liberals, and ignorant of what individual rights and freedoms are? Or, rephrasing the question, is a new and unfinished state able to produce free citizens by means of positive law? The original liberal constitutional optimism fed by the democratic messianism of Nicolae B¥lcescu and Simion B¥rnuµiu included political representation in the sphere of natural rights as a universal franchise the liberal state had to warrant in its capacity as historical commissioner of the “law of liberty.” 52 In the spirit of the French Revolution of February 1848, Nicolae B¥lcescu incorporated universal suffrage 53 into the intellectual heritage of Romanian Liberals. Still, the liberal factions, radical and moderate together, were disturbed by the antiparliamentary 50

Maiorescu, 1994, p. 9. Vs. Lepetit, 1995, pp. 296–298. 52 B¥lcescu, 1986, p. 11. 53 B¥lcescu, 1964, p. 548. 51

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inclination of Prince Cuza and by his will to see that the rural majority had a “share in the political society,” by expanding the use of civil, social and political rights beyond traditional qualifications of status and wealth. Hence, after 1866, they abandoned any reference to universal suffrage. In this respect, Romanian Liberals followed instinctively in the footsteps of their German counterparts who, despite the radical positions adopted in 1848 by the Parliament of Frankfurt, reluctantly accepted the general enfranchisement of the electorate of the Empire undertaken by the conservative chancellor Bismarck.54 Quite predictably, one of the most radical revolutionaries of 1848, Constantin A. Rosetti, initiated an electoral reform bill thirty-five years after, which created a single electoral class made up of all literate people. Nonetheless, only 35 out of his 132 fellow liberal members of Parliament supported this initiative.55 Within a year, the National Liberal government, led by Ion C. Br¥tianu, another one-time radical revolutionary, promoted its own bill, reducing the number of electoral classes from four to three and modestly enhancing the weight of the indirect peasant vote. This way, Br¥tianu showed that he meant every word when, on January 12, 1880, he rejected the right wing opposition’s accusations of radicalism, with this statement: “I’m a conservative as well.” 56 Dissatisfied with a faltering liberal leadership that had transformed a revolutionary ideal into an “untrue illusion,” C.A. Rosetti left the party. Ironically, it took a moderate liberal (and a former member of the February 11, 1866 government that disposed of Cuza’s reforms) to affirm in his presidential program of 1892 that the enforcement of the rule of law would necessarily lead to universal suffrage with proportional representation, an ideal—as Dimitrie A. Sturdza put it—that could not be separated from the intellectual history of Romanian liberalism.57 The National Liberal Congress of 1906 contemplated only a limited electoral enfranchisement, and the congress of 1913 pleaded for “the single electoral class of the literate people” 58 that had been denied to C. A. Rosetti thirty years before. A year later, as the war broke out, Ionel I. C. Br¥tianu declared that out of patriotism and in view of the international situation, any political reforms, especially the electoral one, should be postponed.59 The nation as a subject of international law must take precedence over the nation as a community of citizens.60 It is Stein Rokkan’s contention that 54

Kahan, 2003, pp. 94–102, 141–143. Stan and Iosa, 1996, pp. 230. 56 Gane, 1936, p. 239. 57 Stan and Iosa, 1996, pp. 278. 58 Idem, p. 343. 59 Idem, pp. 358–361. 60 Idem, p. 366. 55

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whenever a state considers its independence at risk, the government of that state feels entitled to slow down the pace of democratization.61 It was only in the spring of 1917, on an official visit to revolutionary Petrograd as President of the Council of Ministers, that Ionel Br¥tianu made public the irrevocable decision of the Liberals to introduce universal suffrage and implement a fair agrarian reform as soon as the war ended.62 Faced with the demise of Russian autocracy and the breakdown of the bureaucratic and military oligarchies that propped up its survival beyond any political logic, Romanian Liberals understood that the only way to avoid a revolutionary completion of the process of modernization they were in charge of since 1848 was to reshape the representative regime on the basis of universal suffrage. The solution may have seemed only fair and democratic at the end of a struggle that was sustained mostly by the peasantry, but the reasoning behind it was utterly conservative. Universal suffrage was a revolution from above in the framework of the liberal state, a revolution that the Liberals hoped to tame and turn to their advantage. In the November 1919 elections, organized by general Arthur V¥itoianu, head of a crypto-liberal government, the peasants were for the first time since 1857 direct voters. Consequently, they cast their ballots for the newly founded Peasant Party, which won close to an absolute majority (46.30%), as a natural political embodiment of the social nation. Nonetheless, the National Liberal party received in the Old Kingdom and in Bessarabia 21.38% of the votes,63 a decent performance that announced their upcoming return to the helm of a state they were not prepared to let go of. At the end of the Great War, the liberal parliamentary oligarchy was completely consumed by its experience of managing a state built from its constitutional cover down to national foundations that did not rest on individual rights and freedoms. Both the war that had laid the responsibility for the survival of the nation on the peasant majority, and the example set by the Russian revolution of February 1917 compelled the Romanian Liberals to revisit their own revolutionary origins and to fulfill their initial democratic agenda. Finally, the past established itself as the political principle of the present.

II. In Post-communist Romania, liberalism was organized around the National Liberal Party (NLP). After 1989, the NLP describes, primarily, the result of a process of historical re-creation. It is not the only one: 61

Peter Flora, editor, 1999, p. 249. Stan and Iosa, 1996, p. 368. 63 Preda, 2002, p. 133. 62

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the National Peasant Party, Christian Democrat (NPP-CD), and the Social Democrat Romanian Party (SDRP) revived the Romanian political tradition, primarily from the interwar period. The reappearance of the three political groups was in fact the most coherent organizational answer given to the direct successors of the December 1989 revolution, initially grouped in the National Salvation Front and, later, in the parties claiming to be born out of the 1989 Revolution. The revival of the historical parties was intended as a coherent answer but its consequences were fragile. The NLP showed, more than the NPP-CD and the SDRP, how precarious such a political formula was. Indeed, the liberal solution was soon to be contested from within; the fragmentation of this political family preceded and surpassed the division of the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. One should notice the volatile political and strategic options of the NLP as well as the instability of its political staff. Nonetheless, the NLP continued to be the central reference point in the process of defining and positioning liberalism in postcommunist Romania. The recreation of the National Liberal Party occurred on December 22, 1989. One of the liberal militants who survived the communist regime, Dan A. L¥z¥rescu, gave an account of this event. Describing the moment of NLP’s resurfacing on the political stage, he claimed: “Relying on some secret information received in mid-September 1989 in Paris, while attending an important historical congress on La Révolution et le droit, information regarding the obligation undertook by Gorbachev to eliminate, by the end of 1989, the last four totalitarian regimes in the satellite countries (in the following order: Honecker, Hussak, Jivkov and Ceauºescu), upon my return to Bucharest I cautiously tried to get in touch with my former liberal prison mates. My colleagues Nicolae Enescu and Sorin Botez visited me on the afternoon December 22, 1989 in my apartment in Bulevardul Ana Ip¥tescu (today Lasc¥r Catargiu). We decided to form a committee to urgently reconstitute the historical National Liberal Party. By December 25, 1989 this committee had another nine names in addition to the first three.” 64 The re-emergence of liberalism in Romania followed a bumpier road than this quote reveals. From 1990 to 2005, the history of the Liberal Party was dominated by what Albert Hirschman has called “exit,” “voice,” and, less often, “loyalty.” 65 The three attitudes that Hirschman considered as typical answers given to the ‘crises’ of organization, proved to be real behavioral types of a “rebirth,” acting simultaneously in the field of liberal politics. The relation between these three attitudes gave 64

L¥z¥rescu, 1996, p. 136. Details in Dan A. L¥z¥rescu, Confesiuni, dialogues with Radu T ¸oanc¥, Bucureºti, Editura Hestia, f.l., 1997, pp. 220–225. 65 Hirschman, 1970.

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birth to chaos rather than order. In other words, not “pluralism” 66 as such but disorder characterized the history of post-communist Romanian Liberals. Consequently, Romanian organizational dynamics were almost incomprehensible. The intertwining of divisions and coalitions led to chain reactions and reciprocal incentives. Therefore, the chronology of events creates a certain perplexity, which can be overcome if one follows closely the structure of the Liberals’ evolution after the four major fractures in the first fifteen years after the fall of communism. The historical fracture, or the cleavage between tradition and transition, separates the will to resume tradition (especially that from the interwar period) from the temptation to define a party “anchored” in the actuality of transition. The NLP, the Liberal Union Br¥tianu (LUB) and the National Liberal Party Câmpeanu (NPLC) illustrate the first tendency, while the National Liberal Party Democratic Convention (NLPDC), Civic Alliance Party (CAP) or the National Liberal Party Youth Wing (NLPYW) represent the second. The identity fracture, or the cleavage political vs. civic, distinguishes between liberal groups that looked for a purely political definition of liberalism (NLP, NLPDC, or NLPYW) and those that tried to add a civic dimension to the political identity (CAP that appeared in 1991, or the Civic liberal group created in 1993). The organizational fracture, or the cleavage separation vs. unification differentiates the Liberals who wanted separation or division from those who wanted the unification of all liberal forces into one single party or political pole. Each liberal party assumed the first option when created and slowly or quickly moved towards the second.67

66 67

I consider here the argument of Sonny Perseil, 2000. Thus, NLPYW, created in July 1990, was willing to unite in February 1993 when it forms (together with two other groups from NLPCD and NLP) a new organism: Liberal Party 93 (LP93). The New Liberal Party created in July 1992 merged with the National Liberal Party after seven months. The CAP accepted the unification with NLP only in 1998, after it had supported an alliance with this party and then with LP93 and NLPCD inside the Civic Liberal Alliance (July 1994–March 1995) and after having constituted a narrow liberal coalition (with LP93) in the 1996 elections. The National Liberal Party Câmpeanu, formed by the separation from NLP in March 1995, looked for unification after departing from its association with The Liberal Union Br¥tianu (LUB) (August 1996) then with NLPCD and LP93 inside the National Liberal Union (December 1996) for, after a new integrationist failure (The Liberal Federation that associated NLP Câmpeanu and the Liberal Christian Party in March 1998) to run alone in the 2000 elections. Finally, NLPCD, formed in April 1992, joined the Civic Liberal Alliance (December 1994), to join the National Liberal Union after the elections of 1996 and split afterwards.

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The strategic fracture, or the cleavage between liberal and anticommunist, refers to electoral participation and divides the liberal family into two camps: one that opted for constituting strictly a liberal pole, group or alliance, and the camp that “melted” the liberal option in a larger project. This integrationist project, the Democratic Convention of Romania, was regarded as an “anticommunist coalition,” as the “democracy camp” or as the expression of a “European option.” 68 To these cleavages, one can add the factional tendencies that affected the various liberal groups from “within.” 69 And finally, one should mention that the liberal label was appealing enough to several small political groups: The Liberal (Liberty) Party in Romania, The Liberal Monarchist Party in Romania, The Party of the Small Enterpreneurs and Free Initiative in Romania, The Liberal Christian Party (led by Radu Ciuceanu), or The Liberal Democrat Party in Romania (LDPR— led by Niculae Cerveni).70 In fact, at least four parties that assumed, in one way or another, a reference to liberalism competed on the political stage for the votes of the electorate in the elections from 1990 to 2000. The number of liberal formations dropped visibly only between 1998–2000, when the National Liberal Party managed to integrate three of its competitors (CAP, NLPDC and LP 93). Nevertheless, in the general elections of 2000 the National Liberal Party was still competing with three other forces claiming a liberal background, directed 68

In the first category of options entered: in 1992 NLP and The New Liberal Party; in 1996, CAP and LP93 (regrouped as the Liberal National Alliance), as well as NLP Câmpeanu and Liberal Union Br¥tianu (grouped in The National Liberal Ecologist Alliance). In 2000 NLP eventually chooses to run alone as a liberal pole (since in the past two years it collected the energies of all its vehement contestants during transition). The integrationist category also evolves in time: the NLP first enters here from the beginning of the National Convention for establishing Democracy (CNID) and the Democratic Convention from Romania (CDR) until April 1992 (when Câmpeanu’s party left the anticommunist alliance). In the 1992 elections, NLPCD and CAP enter the Democratic Convention; in 1996, NLP and NLPCD run in election as part of the Democratic Convention while CAP and LP93 make up a separate coalition after leaving the Democratic Convention in March 1995. Finally, in July 2000, NLP leaves the Convention again. The creation of D.A. Alliance, a cooperation between NLP and the Democrat Party, is the expression of overcoming these differences. 69 Thus, the Quintus and the Câmpeanu wings fought inside NLP from 1993 to 1995, the Popovici wing and the Cerveni wing disputed the leadership of NLPCD in 1996–1997, the same as the Patriciu wing opposed Stoica’s group inside NLP. 70 I have not included in this list the Free-Change Party (Partidul Liber-Schimbist) created in 1990 by ªtefan Cazimir since, far from advocating free trade, the title was an irony, in I.L. Caragiale’s style of the values of liberalism.

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by political actors drawn into “the liberal fight” during the entire postrevolutionary period: Radu Câmpeanu, Ion I. Br¥tianu and Niculae Cerveni.71 After the general elections, the NLP managed to absorb three other political groups. In January 2002, the Liberals incorporated a party invented under the “third way” label, which eventually discovered a social-liberal identity (The Alliance for Romania). In 2003 two other formations became part of the NLP: The Union of the Right Wing Forces and NLP Câmpeanu. From its electoral evolution point of view, NLP is a small party. In the five elections held between 1990 and 2004, NLP had an 8% average of the votes for the Chamber and around 9% of the options for the Senate. What is specific for NLP’s strategy is that it obtained these results running three times on separate lists (in 1990, 1992—when they failed to pass the electoral threshold—and 2000) and twice on the lists of alliances, more precisely, the winning coalition in 1996 (DCR) and the coalition arrived in second place for the 2004 elections (D.A. Alliance, between the National Liberal Party and the Democrat Party). Except for the Liberal Union Br¥tianu, which won a deputy mandate in 1990, the other liberal groups, apart from NLP, did not get any parliamentary mandates other than on the lists of the DCR. This was the case for NLPYW and CAP in 1992, with NLPDC in 1992 and 1996. The liberal political groups that provided an alternative to the NLP were major electoral failures. The scores that the New Liberal Party had in 1992, or the National Liberal Alliance (recombining CAP and LP93) or the National Liberal Ecologist Alliance (that included NLPC, LB Br¥tianu and a small ecologist party) in 1996 match the scores of obscure parties. In 2004, for the first time after the fall of communism, no liberal force competed with the NLP. However, NLP itself was hidden under the label of a coalition in this ballot, D.A. Alliance NLP-DP. The year 2004 represented the highlight of liberal electoral history in postcommunist Romania. The local and general elections of that year brought forth a significant electoral increase for the Liberals, NLP being the only center right party that had national public support. In the local elections of June 2004, the NLP got almost 1.5 million votes, which translated into 443 mayor mandates (14% of the total), 281 county counselors’ mandates (19.5% of the total) and 7,037 mandates of local councilors (around 17.5% of the total). The territorial distribution of the votes and mandates is extremely interesting. NLP has county coun71

It is worth noting that all these three competitors tried—in order to consolidate the opposition towards NLP—to get closer to the Greater Romania Party or to other minor organizations like the Green Party or the Romanian Party for a New Society.

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cilors in all the constituencies except in Covasna and Harghita, counties dominated by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR). The alliances within the county councils, made with a view to electing the executive bodies of these administrative organizations, led to the formation of a large number of political formulas. Lacking center–right wing partners, NLP formed alliances with various left-wing forces. The general elections’ results confirmed for the most part the trends seen in the local elections. NLP maintained the dominant position in the center–right area, obtaining 64 mandates for the Chamber (approximately 19% of the total) and 28 mandates for the Senate (approximately 20% of the total), twice the number it had in 2000. For the presidency, NLP opted for supporting the social-democrat leader (Traian B¥sescu), a winner in the second round against another social democrat (Adrian N¥stase). The limited presence of the Liberals in Parliament between 1990 and 2000 explains their position and role in the post-December 1989 governments. NLP had representatives in five of the seven cabinets formed between May 1990 and December 2004. From the installation of the Roman government that resulted from the first free elections (June 29, 1990) and until December 28, 2004, NLP has been in power for 2,068 days and in opposition for 3,236 days. Despite this rather positive balance for a small party, the NLP’s role in government has been minor. The NLP had 22 ministries: two in the last period of Petre Roman’s government (April–October 1991), three in Theodor Stolojan’s government (October 1991–November 1992), eight in Victor Ciorbea’s government (December 1996–April 1998), five in Radu Vasile’s government (April 1998–December 1999) and four in Mugur Is¥rescu’s cabinet (December 1999–December 2000).72 It was only fifteen years after the fall of communism that Romania had an NLP Prime Minister. In the government formed by C¥lin Popescu-T¥riceanu at the end of 2004, this party has, apart for the PM’s position, six ministerial portfolios (foreign affairs, defense, finance, agriculture, health and culture) as well as three positions of delegate ministers (for the relationship with Parliament, for putting into practice the international funding programs, for coordinating the Government’s General Secretariat). One should regard the political competition in which the NLP was engaged between 1990 and 2005 using a threefold perspective. First, the competition between the partisan Romanian families; second, the NLP’s relations with the other liberal groups as well as with other center–right parties in Romania; and third, the parties’ view concerning 72

The other liberal parties had a more discreet presence: NLPYW had a minister in the Roman government and NLPCD had one representative in the Ciorbea government.

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the relationship between the parliamentary majority and the governing coalitions. The competition between the partisan families can best be followed from the standpoint of the electoral evolution. Considering the electoral performances of the nine political families for the Eastern and Central European countries after the fall of communism,73 one may note that the Liberals, like the other three political families (the agrarians, the extremists and the minorities) turn around a 10% average. Each of these families competes against the social-democratic dominant family that has around 47% of the votes. These scores do not tell us much if two other elements are not considered. The first is the internal competition, which affected not just the liberal family but also the social-democratic one. Thus, the quarrel between the Democrat Party and the Democratic Front of National Salvation’ (between 1992 and 1996) or, the Social Democratic Party “divided” the social-democratic score. A near unbalanced ratio was created between a Democratic Party that went from 7% to 13% of the vote and a Democratic Front of National Salvation/Social Democracy Romanian Party/ Social Democratic Party that moved from 20% to 35%. Inside the Liberal family, the NLP dominated rather authoritatively, except for 1992 when two of the competing liberal fractions grouped in the Democratic Convention managed to enter Parliament. In 2000, the NLP was contested from a vaguely social-liberal perspective by the Alliance for Romania in the June local elections. After a failed negotiation with this party, the Liberals managed to obtain a 3% lead over their competitors, which allowed them to enter Parliament (while their competitors lost). In 2004, the NLP had to face no real challenge in the center–right area, as the Christian-Democratic National Peasants’ Party failed for the second consecutive time to get any parliamentary seats. One last key element that has to be considered when placing NLP in the post-December 1989 political game regards the particularities of the Romanian political system. Unlike the 1990 elections, when the National Salvation Front’s victory created a comfortable parliamentary majority, the other post-communist elections produced what Douglas Rae has called “natural minorities” 74 (requiring negotiations for obtaining a 73

I used the partisan family categories as defined by Christian Vandermotten and Pablo Medina Lockhart “La géographie électorale de l’Europe centreorientale,” in Jean-Michel de Waele ed., Partis politiques et démocraties en Europe Centrale et Orientale, (Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2002, pp. 17–34) and I applied them to the Romanian case in the epilogue: “Liberalisme ºi partide liberale în România,” to the Romanian edition of Pascal Delwit, 2003, pp. 326–348. 74 Rae, 1967, pp. 74–77.

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parliamentary majority). On the other hand, two views regarding the relationship between Parliament and the government have taken shape since 1992. The first is the minority governing formula that was undertaken by the Democratic National Salvation Front during 1992–1996 (with a break in 1995) and by the Social Democratic Party after the 2000 elections: the Nicolae V¥c¥roiu and Adrian N¥stase’s governments were supported by the “Red quadrilateral” (The Democratic National Salvation Front, The Greater Romania Party, The Socialist Workers’ Party, The National Unity Party) and, after 2000, by the parliamentary alliance with The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania and a parliamentary and governing alliance with the Humanist Romanian Party (until July 2003). The second vision is that of the consensual governing formula, whereby the cabinet has exactly the same configuration as the parliamentary majority, like the Democrat Convention–The Social Democrat Union–The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania coalition between 1996–2000, and the National Liberal Party– The Democrat Party–The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania–The Humanist Romanian Party coalition after the 2004 elections. These two views have correspondingly different explanations in terms of electoral participation. First, in a political system based on proportional representation, the strategy of separate lists may produce a relative majority and eventually a dominant position when it comes to negotiating a parliamentary coalition. The second view is linked to a consensual strategy of constituting a pre-electoral large alliance, meant to anticipate the formula of a majority cabinet. In the 1992 elections, NLP opted not so much for one formula or another as for the violent refusal of the second, and failed to enter the legislative body. In 1996, the same party embraced the consensual solution—The Democratic Convention—obtaining not just entry into Parliament, but also a significant presence in the government alongside The Christian-Democratic National Peasants’ Party, The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, The Democrat Party and The Social Democrat Party. In 2000, NLP refused the consensual formula again. During the negotiations with the Alliance for Romania, the Liberals were relying on a 33%–35% electoral score that would have allowed forming a pole large enough to support a minority government. After the modest score obtained in the 2000 elections, NLP was tempted to support Adrian N¥stase’s minority cabinet, signing a protocol with the Social Democrat Party on December 27, 2000. They abandoned the protocol on May 11, 2001. Finally, in 2004, NLP opted for a narrower alliance with the democrats. Its final success was linked to Traian B¥sescu’s victory in the presidential elections and, after the split of the electoral alliance between The Social Democrat Party and The Humanist Romanian Party, to the negotiation of a fourfold governing party coalition.

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The liberal doctrine formulated in post-1989 Romania is an affirmation of the principle of the rule of law and market values. Its main source is represented by the political programs of the liberal parties. Regardless. if we speak about the NLP’s temptation to extend the interwar tradition, about CAP’s civic neo-liberalism or about the radical economic liberalism of NLPYW/ LP93, all these party programs, which regard liberalism a resource, stressed the value of equality under the law and the minimal state. Although not devoid of ambiguities that remind one either of a conservative doctrine or a socialist one,75 the liberal visions outlined a form of social optimism that strongly contradicts the pessimism characterizing contemporary Romanian society. Apparently, this optimism has had ideological consequences, for the liberal doctrine gained in consistency in the last decade of the twentieth century.76 Yet, paradoxically, although the liberal political programs put their money on synchronization with the globalizing processes and on European integration, there are no public policies developed under the NLP label or any other liberal faction for that matter. On the other hand, there are enough reasons to state that describing NLP as a liberal formation is somewhat ambiguous: NLP capitalizes on self-identification rather than on a partisan identity based on the mobilization of a stable type of electorate or one of it specific parts. It is more a discourse built in terms of historical recognition rather than one linked to the present. Lastly, it is a formation placing itself at center–right in order to avoid a more thorough definition of its own political identity. At the beginning of 2005, the National Liberal Party reunited several currents: a) a traditionalist current legitimated by the historical memory of NLP and promoting moderate interventionist policies; b) an ultraliberal current, inspired by American anarchic-capitalism and pleading for a minimal state; c) the social liberal current, resulting from the merger with the Alliance for Romania; d) a popular current, resulting from fusion with the nationalist group the Union of the Rightwing Forces and from the ambition to represent the popular European family in Romania. The concern for doctrinaire formulas is still marked by a certain incoherence. Thus, after completing the liberal unification and the elec75

This paragraph draws heavily from an excellent file entitled: “Partide liberale în România,” comprised by Polis journal, Issue 3/1997 which contains the articles: Radu Carp, “Neoliberalismul românesc: istorie ºi neadaptare,” pp. 70–83; Alexandra Ionescu, Filon Morar, “Proiectul liberal pentru perioada de tranziµie. Cazul PNL ºi PL’93,” pp. 84–92 and Andreea Voicu-Jiquidi, “PAC ºi neoliberalismul,” pp. 93–99. 76 An example for this is the volume PNL-Doctrin¥ ºi programe, printed in 2000. See also www.pnl.ro

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toral coalition with a member of the Socialist International (The Democrat Party), the former NLP president, Valeriu Stoica, launched in July 2004 a merger project between the Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party, not only in order to counterbalance the Social Democratic Party in the elections, but also to obtain for the Romanian center-right an affiliation with the European Popular Party.77 The Liberals and the democrats would meet within this view in the eclectic Popular and Christian Democrat European family. Liberal political self-consciousness had various sources, more numerous than the political programs or the volumes written by NLP,78 CAP,79 or LP93 leaders80: historical writings about the Romanian liberal tradition,81 anthologies or dictionaries of Romanian 82 or Western 83 liberal thinking, as well as some scholarly contributions to political philosophy,84 articles published in the monthly Sfera politicii and the quarterly Polis, and newspaper articles in the liberal political press.85 Post-communist Liberals also contributed to the nationalist vernacular. Thus, as the second post-communist president of NLP argues, the party’s fundamental value is “the love for the nation and the country, 77

Transformed in a motion initiated for the February 4–5, 2005 Congress, this project was rejected by the NLP members: just 84 out of 1296 delegates in Congress voted in favor. 78 Radu Câmpeanu, Cu gândul la µar¥, Bucharest, CBC, 1995; Mircea Ionescu Quintus, Liberal din tat¥-n fiu, Bucharest, Editura Vitruviu, f.l., 1996; Mircea Ionescu-Quintus, Ce-aµi f¥cut în ultimii cinci ani?, Editura Maºina de scris, 2004; Valeriu Stoica, Puterea, un r¥u necesar, Bucharest, Editura ALLFA, 2002; Valeriu Stoica, Provoc¥ri liberale, dialoguri cu Dragoº Aligic¥, Bucharest, Editura Humanitas, 2003; Dan A. L¥z¥rescu, 1996; Dan A. L¥z¥rescu, 1997. For an analysis of Câmpeanu, Quintus and L¥z¥rescu, see Cristian Preda, “Delirul liberal românesc. Mic dicµionar,” in Polis, Issue 3/1997, pp. 155–158. 79 Nicolae Manolescu, Dreptul la normalitate: discursul politic ºi realitatea, Bucharest, Editura Litera, 1991; Stelian T¥nase, Revoluµia ca eºec. Elite & societate, Polirom, Iaºi, 1996. 80 Dinu Patriciu and Horia Rusu, Capitalismul românesc: un proiect, Bucharest, Omega Press, 1998. 81 Apostol Stan and Mircea Iosa, 1996; 1999; R¥dulescu-Zoner, 2000. 82 Ilincioiu, 1999. 83 Cristian Preda, ed. Liberalismul, Nemira, Bucharest, 2000; Cristian Preda, Mic dicµionar de gândire politic¥ liberal¥, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2004. 84 Aurelian Cr¥iuµu, Elogiul libert¥µii. Studii de filosofie politic¥, Iaºi, Polirom, 1998; Adrian-Paul Iliescu, Liberalismul între succese ºi iluzii, Bucharest, All, 1998; Cristian Preda, Le libéralisme du désespoir. Tradition libérale et critique du libéralisme entre 1938 et 1960, Editura Universit¥µii din Bucharest, 2000. 85 From the collected articles I mention: Stelian T¥nase, ªocuri ºi crize, Bucharest, Editura Staff, 1993; Horia-Roman Patapievici, Politice, Bucharest, Humanitas, 1996; Preda, 2001b.

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above all economic, social and political ideas.” 86 The constitutional debate of the 1990–1991 highlighted the intellectual affinity of the liberal deputies with the successors of national communism. For example, they perceived Romanian history as one of unmatched hardships, placed under a Providence that deprives the individual of any responsibility and puts nation under the sign of Almighty God.87 These affinities have political consequences, as one could note during the vote that followed the Constitutional debate about the protection of ethnic minorities. Thus, if the article that stipulated the Romanian state’s support for Romanians living in other states (“for developing and expressing their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity”) was adopted unanimously, only 23 out of 310 votes supported an amendment of a Hungarian deputy (Ludovic Demény) that stipulated an identical mechanism of protection—from the “mother nation”—for the national minorities living in Romania. This refusal was justified by the Liberal Mircea Ionescu-Quintus, who said: “Let Turkey, Russia or Hungary put an article like this in their constitutions, but this cannot be present in the Romanian Constitution.” 88 Prominent NLP leaders sometimes summed up in their writings themes that had a strong nationalist touch, for instance, such a theme is the (self)flattering portrayal of the Romanian people as “gifted with intelligence and justified national pride by God” or as a “nation with extremely kind, talented and patient people.” 89 Even more surprising was the characterization of Antonescu’s regime, made by the first NLP president after 1989. According to Radu Câmpeanu, that regime was defined by “humanity and moderation,” and the dictator was considered “a great Romanian.” 90 The relation between post-communist liberalism and nationalism allowed the definition of a right-wing liberal vision, according to which the nation is understood as “a nation of owners and possible investors” whereas the national soul reunites an ethnic identity, as well as a civic one: “the Right wing national soul reunites the ethno-cultural fundament of the Romanian system with the system of civic responsibility. The national identity has thus a double meaning: the feeling of belonging to an ethno-cultural community and to a state. It is rooted both in an inalienable right and in a moral obligation. It is important, in an age of 86

Ionescu-Quintus, 2004, pp. 21–22. This vision is found in liberals like Dan A. L¥z¥rescu, René-Radu Policrat or Ion Br¥tianu—see Geneza Constituµiei României, pp. 66, 132, 163 and 199. For details see Preda, 2001a, pp. 733–762. 88 According to: Geneza Constituµiei României, pp. 164–166. 89 The two descriptions can be found in Radu Câmpeanu, p. 124 and Mircea Ionescu-Quintus, 1996, p. 88. 90 Radu Câmpeanu, p. 42. 87

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confusion, to underline that what defines “good Romanian” is not one’s ethnic identity as much as one’s quality as a citizen of Romania who understands, according to the laws, the need to respect one’s obligations and to exert one’s rights. National consciousness has to be understood as a corollary of ethnic and civic identity, placed under the love for the nation and the country.” 91 A clearer distinction between ethnic nation and civic nation was put forward only in 2001 92 in a political context tensioned by NLP’s concerns with regard to the status law regarding the Hungarians living outside the borders of the Hungarian state. Valeriu Stoica delineated two visions of the nation: one influenced by Herder and one taken from the French political tradition: “We have on the one side an ethnic nation and on the other side a civic nation,” Stoica claimed. “The first is based on an ethnic criterion, the second on citizenship. The first is an organic and conservative concept, while the second is a liberal one. While the first departs from the idea of a community of blood, the second from the idea of the citizen, a liberal concept…The civic nation is based on a contract between citizens.” For Stoica, ethnic nation was a poor concept—the blood-based community is “completely absurd and imaginary”—but also dangerous since “the ethnic nation led to the two world wars of the 20th century.” It could equally support “democracy, totalitarianism and authoritarianism,” 93 unlike the civic nation, which is based on “the idea of consent,” compatible with democracy.94 The distinction between the two types of nation brings about an interpretation of history that is different from the one NLP had in the early post-communist period. This interpretation does not eliminate the concept of nation, but tries to redefine it. Thus, for Valeriu Stoica, the history of liberal Romanian democracy is tied to the project of the nation. The Liberals “undertook three projects: national, democratic and of modernizing Romania, and all these projects were carried out successfully.” The national project had a logical and chronological precedence in Romania, imposing a split within the liberal doctrine. “Because the project of liberal democracy and the project of modernization could not have been accomplished but in a national frame,” Stoica argued, 91

Varujan Vosganian, Mesajul dreptei româneºti. Tradiµie ºi modernitate, Bucharest, Nemira, 2001, pp. 138, 305 and 449–450. 92 The author thinks of this delay as an error of the Liberals: “In 1990 (...) we should have had debated the national issue and solve it on a democratic and liberal basis. Instead of this, we kept quiet. NLP understood this error and undertook this extremely difficult game. It is very difficult, since after a long time, during which the national issue was approached only by the nationalists, whereas when a democratic party approached it, it was labeled as nationalist” (Valeriu Stoica, 2003, pp. 169–170). 93 Stoica, 2002, pp. 54–55. 94 Stoica, 2003, pp. 171–172.

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“the first project undertaken by the Br¥tianu dynasty was the national one (…) They understood that to consolidate Romania economically, in a world that was defined by protectionism and nationalism, liberalism could be split into two: liberalism inside, protectionism outside.” 95 Using one of Pierre Manent’s concepts,96 Stoica argues that if the nation has been for two centuries the “core of democracy,” “the Europe we want to build” today “could become such a political core.” 97 Relying on the ideas of Jacques Delors and refining the substitution that “the power accumulated at the level of the national state has to be dissipated but not destroyed. We have to transfer power to the local communities and diminish the power at the center; and we have to operate a transfer of sovereignty at the level of the European Union institutions.” Stoica’s project points towards a federalist solution: “Not the fragmentation and dissolution of the state is the solution for Europe but, on the contrary, the federalization of Europe.” 98 The evolution of Romanian liberalism from 1989 to 2005 has been a complex one. From fragmentation to unification, from an outsider on the parliamentary scene between 1992 and 1996 to the main political component of the government in 2005, from a coalition with the historical parties to cooperation with the Democrat Party (a splinter group that seceded from the National Salvation Front), from a nationalist to a federalist vision of Europe, NLP was a circumstantial party, a party of transition. Its evolution is not just significant for liberalism but for the entire Romanian society after the fall of communism.

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Kahan, Alan S. 2003. Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century Europe. The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kocka, Jürgen, and Allan Mitchell, eds. 1993. Bourgeois Society in NineteenthCentury Europe. Oxford: Berg. Lampe, John R. 1975. “Varieties of Unsuccessful Industrialization: The Balkan States Before 1914,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 56–85. L¥z¥rescu, Dan A. 1996. Introducere în istoria liberalismului european ºi în istoria Partidului Naµional Liberal din România. Bucharest: Editura Viitorul Românesc. Lepetit, Bernard, ed. 1995. Les formes de l’expérience. Une autre histoire sociale. Paris: Albin Michel. Linz, Juan J. 1981. “A Century of Politics and Interests in Spain,” in Suzanne Berger, pp. 367–375. Maiorescu, Titu. 1897. Discursuri parlamentare cu priviri asupra dezvolt¥rii politice a României sub domnia lui Carol I. Vol. I, Bucharest: Socec. ———. 1899. Discursuri parlamentare cu priviri asupra dezvolt¥rii politice a României sub domnia lui Carol I. Vol. III, Bucharest: Socec. ———. 1937. Însemn¥ri zilnice. Vol. I, Bucharest: Socec. ———. 1967. Critice. Vol. I, Bucharest: Editura pentru Literatur¥. ———. 1994. Istoria politic¥ a României sub domnia lui Carol I. Bucharest: Humanitas. Manent, Pierre 2001. “La démocratie et la nation,” Studia politica. Romanian Political Science Review, vol. I, No. 1, pp. 9–17. Mosca, Gaetano. 1982. Elementi di scienza politica. Torino: UTET. Mouzelis, Nicos P. 1986. Politics in the Semi-Periphery. Early Parliamentarianism and Late Industrialisation in the Balkans and Latin America. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Perseil, Sonny. 2000. Liberal la plural. Bucharest: Editura Libertés, Pocock, J.G.A. 1985. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, Brian A. 1996. “The Social Nation and Its Futures: English Liberalism and Polish Nationalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Warsaw,” American Historical Review 101, No. 5, pp. 1470–1492. Preda, Cristian. 2000. Le libéralisme du désespoir. Tradition libérale et critique du libéralisme entre 1938 et 1960. Bucharest: Editura Universit¥µii din Bucureºti. ———. 2001a. “La nation dans la Constitution,” Studia politica. Romania Political Science Review, vol. I, No. 3, pp. 733-762. ———. 2001b. Tranziµie, liberalism ºi naµiune. Bucharest: Editura Nemira. ———. 2002. România postcomunist¥ ºi România interbelic¥. Bucharest: Meridiane. ———. 2003. “Liberalisme ºi partide liberale în România,” in Pascal Delwit, pp. 326–348. R¥dulescu-Zoner, Serban, ed. 2000. Istoria Partidului Naµional Liberal. Bucharest: Editura All. Schmitt, Carl 1993. Verfassungslehre. 8. Auflage. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Stan Apostol, and Mircea Iosa. 1996. Liberalismul politic în România. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedic¥.

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The Interesting Anomaly of Balkan Liberalism DIANA MISHKOVA

I. To this day, the notion of Balkan liberalism is likely to convey a certain sense of irregularity. Students of the European history of political ideas who are either mesmerized by the classic examples of modern political thought or accustomed to seeing political structures as an outgrowth of social and economic ones would positively be wary of taking liberalism in the Balkans seriously.1 In the midst of the progressivist skepticism of the inter-war years, one of Romania’s most radical westernizers, Eugen Lovinescu, wrote in his “History of the modern Romanian civilization” the following: “Even if we agree in principle that the national feeling or the feeling of personal liberty had developed genetically from the requisites of capitalism, we have still adopted them under their ultimate and completed form by way of ideology.” Lovinescu was keen to point to the revolutionizing, history-accelerating potentiality of ideologies and thus put in the center of his seminal analysis the (all too obvious) contradictions and conflicts ensuing from the incongruence of capitalism and liberalism in Romania—a noteworthy herald of Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of co-temporality of the non-co-temporal. By doing so, he set the stage for a meaningful debate over the nature of Romanian and, more generally, Balkan liberalism. But, some contingent treatises notwithstanding, the debate never really took place. There are several pathways along which the discussion seems worthwhile restarting. One is the call for re-thinking the roots and a grounds

1

While at the Institute of European Universities in Florence in 1991, for example, I met with little encouragement to deal with such a topic and was counseled instead to confront the really relevant one of Balkan nationalism. Contingencies of (geo)political order no doubt have had an important say in all this. While a socialist reading of nineteenth-century liberalism used to present it either as an epiphenomenal aspect of the movements for “national liberation” during their “progressive phase” or else as a sham etiquette of corrupted bourgeois formations, the neo-liberal turn that marked the first half of the 1990s tended to overemphasize the continuity of liberal traditions and the repositories of ‘Western’-like liberal values in the countries of Eastern Europe.

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for the apparent yet (allegedly) paradoxical blend between nineteenthcentury universalism and particularism or, to put it differently, between the projects of modernity and the projects of preserving the “national self.” In important respects, this concoction may be traced back to late Enlightenment idioms thus posing the need for re-thinking the relationship between thematisations of the national character and liberal reformism. Another is the increasing awareness of the need to address the history of political thinking in terms of a continuous dialogue between “core” and “peripheral” traditions. Although in differing, context-bound proportions, what we are confronted with under the heading of conceptual or paradigm transfer has never had a one-way impact (as commonly implied by notions such as “influence,” “import,” “adaptation”) but a circulation of ideas where complex trajectories of interaction and modes of involvement of the “recipient” culture occupy the center stage. Thus viewed, the question is not one of how faithfully a “West-European” mainstream tradition had been assimilated outside its place of origin and in this way resolving the issue of its “validity.” 2 The question, the series of questions as a matter of fact, should be about why certain ideas became paradigmatic for a variety of “structural cases;” which were the versions or elements selected for local implementation; what were the hopes and potentials pinned on them; with what success; and how should we account for the similarities and the differences in all that. The argument, in other words, calls for greater attention to the regional articulations of a universal philosophy, that is to say, doing justice to the autonomy of political values and the timing of cultural transfer but also to social institutions and cultural-political contexts.

II. Lovinescu’s thesis points to a conspicuous approach to this thick problematique—the paradigmatic and interrelated reference to “national feeling” and “personal liberty.” This is a significant and, in terms of the observable East-European historical cases, pervasive association. In the constitutive normative core of Balkan modernity in the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism, much as liberalism and romanticism, formed one inextricable whole. Far from being eroded by the tension between popular sovereignty and individual liberty, it is precisely this association which explains Balkan liberalism’s “constructivist” lure and mobilizational power. It did not emerge as and never became a philosophical or ethical strain of thought spurred by “intrinsic” theoretical

2

This is what actually dominated the studies of Balkan liberalisms, few as they had been, such as the useful article of V. Brown, 1982, pp. 269–301.

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polemics. Its purpose, or raison d’être, was an activist, socially and politically engineering one. Liberal ideas and movements were primarily responsible for the emergence and the socio-political assignment of the first local concepts of modern rule and of the first modern institutions: indeed, it is to them that the credit for the creation of the Balkan nationstates should go. Theirs was the ideology of liberal nationalism, under whose banner the fights for national unification and independence were waged and a concept of legitimate government different from the traditional one was implanted: a representative government, the opposite of the autocratic or the bureaucratic one, enacted by the liberals themselves on behalf of the sovereign nation. Liberalism in this usage meant a politics and a political philosophy, a set of political institutions and a rhetoric. The noted feats of Balkan liberalism were enacted by virtue of apparent “deviations” from or, depending on the perspective, “extensions” of the normative European “archetypes.” For central to it was not the assault on social and political privilege and defense of the “natural” demands of rehabilitated individuals, even less laissez-faire economics and anticlericalism. Central to it was the projection of the individualistic notion of natural rights onto the body of the national whole—the translation of personal freedom and civil rights into the right of each nationality to “its own” sovereign state and “free” development. Next to supplying the modern techniques of nation- and modern state-formation, liberalism in the Balkans provided—to use Brian A. Porter’s phrase about late-nineteenth century Polish liberalism—“a new way to describe the nation and to imagine its future.” 3 Unlike in post-1863 Poland, however, the liberals in the Balkans could effectively combine “cause” and “society” or “the-nation-as-historical-actor” and “the-nation-ascommunity” in their mode of conceptualizing the modern collectivities in-the-making. In order to explain the activist potential of this romantic brand of liberalism in contexts as structurally different as those of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, we need to first look into the societal setting and political cultures within which it emerged. In each of these countries the apparent challenge to any modernizing elite would have been its ability to devise means to energize an immobile, largely traditional rural society that almost totally lacked the ferments of modern capitalism and democracy. Inevitably, as it were, the imposing social prevalence of the village was to have a powerful impact on the entire range of socio-political projects. Yet, the shared economic baselines notwithstanding, there were major structural divergences between the three states with roots in

3

Porter, 1996, p. 1470.

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their divergent status under the Ottoman administrative system, hence, social profile. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, rural Serbia represented a relatively undifferentiated, socially egalitarian society of free—and enfranchised—peasant owners. The common social nexus of the pioneers of the modern political order in Serbia—the selfconscious Serbian liberals—was the Shumadian village. It is from there that they set off for the French and German universities, and on its rediscovered freedom-loving and creative tradition again—the folkloric womb of the incipient Serbian nation—did they build their modern projects. The Romanian societal landscape presented a fairly contrasting picture: the large landholders and the state held about 70 per cent of the agricultural land, and the relative size and public weight of the urban middle classes, although ethnically highly heterogeneous, was considerably greater than in Serbia. Romania’s relatively better economic performance, against the backdrop of harsh social contrasts, was accompanied by recurrent conflicts. While economic growth was far slower in Serbia, it also witnessed less social differentiation and higher social stability. These major differences go a long way in explaining the rather different profiles of the political classes in the two countries. If the common feature of the emergent modern Serbian elite was its peasant origin, that of the Romanian political or intellectual class was its quasi-aristocratic landowning, traditionally ruling origin. The Bulgarian case, in comparison, was a mixed or “in-between” one in political and social sense. Until as late as 1878 a Bulgarian state, similar to those of the Serbs and the Romanians, had failed to materialize and the Bulgarian national-liberal movement, unfolding within the framework of the late Ottoman Empire, preserved its subversive character for most of the century. However, since the 1830s, the Empire itself was undergoing a process of administrative and social reforms from which the incipient Bulgarian elite of economically rising local notables, manufacturers and merchants as well as intelligentsia (largely Russian and Greek, far less Western educated) benefited considerably. And, although the secession from the Empire delivered a heavy blow to the most prosperous among them and whereas the re-distribution of land produced an overwhelming mass of small independent proprietors, at the beginning of its modern statehood the Bulgarian society and civic infrastructure presented a by far more differentiated picture than the Serbian principality of the first half of the nineteenth century. Albeit in neither of these cases did the specific social profiles wholly determine the choice of political philosophies, they did account for some important differences in the kind of limitations, modes of legitimization and ethos of the constitutive groups of the ruling elites in the three countries. These distinct contexts and political classes should be kept in mind when discussing the differing lists of liberal themes, with their

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particular visions of society and its prospects for advancement, in the three countries. The legacies of the initial phase of nation- and state-formation had much to do with all this and were critical for the varieties of liberalism upheld and implemented. Everywhere in the Balkans until the mid nineteenth century—that is, during the early stages of modern state-building, the joint monopoly on power of monarchs and (aristocratic or bureaucratic) oligarchies remained unchallenged, and the rivalry between them was the only legitimate form of political opposition. Under the resulting political stability, this state class could safely pursue its irredentist and state-building enterprises in the administrative, fiscal, judicial and educational fields. Irrespective of whether monarchic absolutism or its opponents achieved political supremacy, bureaucratic centralization proceeded steadily, following the claim to a new political status for these states and aggressively demolishing the remnants of popular self-government. Aspirations to independence and unification, to social or cultural advancement remained subordinated to the traditional hierarchically structured concept of the nation. This is worthwhile stressing because historiographic assessments of the outcome of the military struggles at the beginning of the nineteenth century—among the Serbs, the Greeks and in the Romanian principalities—generally treat the consequent political regimes in those countries as not merely the institutional frameworks within which the future construction of nation-states became possible, but as directly establishing such states. The riots, it is true, had eliminated the Ottoman politico-administrative control and transferred power to a local political class. However, nowhere during the first half of the century did this class formulate or demonstrate—by way of its organizing and exercising political power—that it had been pursuing the creation of a nation-, therefore, modern state. Its central concern had been the institutionalization of the new state which, with very limited means, succeeded in absorbing local political elites and peasant populations and in promoting itself as the only factor of legitimacy in political life.4 Until the middle of the nineteenth century then, the newly emerging, non-traditional ruling elites sought to justify their claim to rule by complying with the peasant’s atavistic conception of power. And, indeed, there are numerous signs of the political strength of the peasantry and of the breakthroughs which its notions of sound government had managed to impose upon the political class.5 4

This was true also for the Greek state following its establishment in 1830 and until at least the 1860s. See Kostis, 2002, pp. 47–64. 5 For a fuller elaboration of this argument, see Mishkova, 2001.

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These were the intricate legacies that the Balkan liberals saw themselves forced to act upon—legacies that also set powerful limits to their differing strategies. At their background, it is quite astonishing to see that, since their thunderous appearance on the political scene between the late 1840s and the early 1860s, the “liberal patriots” succeeded in remaining there as major political actors, and in Romania and Bulgaria to pull the reigns of power for most of the time until the First World War. The profession of faith of these largely foreign-educated intellectuals in the three countries was remarkably uniform: their states could progress only if they adopted the liberal political institutions of the “progressive” West. Economic advancement for them was contingent upon the creation of a favorable political environment whose main attributes would be national sovereignty, representative government and civil rights. The Serbian students abroad tell us that one of their spiritual leaders, Vladimir Jovanovi∆, was afflicted by “the divergences separating patriarchal, stock-breeding and agrarian Serbia from the advanced cultured states,” yet they were equally convinced that “with the liberation and unification of the Serbian people, [Serbia] would take its place in the advanced cultured world.” 6 But what did liberation and unification of the people actually mean for them? These were the central catchwords used by most nineteenth-century protagonists and various strains of nationalists as self-explanatory— in the same sense as the unalienable rights were in the famous passage of the American Declaration of Independence. It is, however, the painstaking answer to this question, and the related definition of that which was entitled to liberty and unity—the national community—that holds the key to understanding this peculiar strain of European liberalism.

III. The appearance of the “freedom-loving patriots” and their political propaganda in Serbia dates from 1848. Although they had little sympathy for the oligarchic regime of the paternalist and cameralist state-class, their messages had a wholly “external” address: completion of national liberation by, firstly, achieving full independence for the autonomous yet vassal Serbian principality from the Ottoman suzerain and, secondly, unifying “all Serbs” in a national Serbian state. These were the objectives instigating their clandestine support for the rebel Serbs in Habsburg Vojvodina and the designs for the creation of a unified South-Slav state. The scale of the 1848 movement in Serbia, however, was considerably smaller than that in the neighboring Habsburg lands or even the

6

Jovanovi∆, 1988, p. 67.

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Romanian principalities. If anything, wrote V. Jovanovi∆ in his Memoirs, “the spirit of the time spurred in Serbia a movement of ideas which, albeit failing to change the internal political situation for the better, at least raised the public opinion to an awareness of the national solidarity of Serbia with the other parts of Serbdom, and, along with it, awareness of a Slav unity.” 7 During the following decade, the students of the Belgrade lyceum, gathered in the so-called Liberal Club, were to add several liberal items to the list—freedom of the press, of assembly and of religion, free education and trade, personal security and the inviolability of property, and enlargement and improvement of the network of schools and roads.8 However, they and their exiled followers abroad continued to be deprived of any lawful right to voice and push these freedoms and demands at home. Liberal nationalism, as distinct from and far exceeding the statist designs for a “Balkan Piedmont” of the ruling bureaucrats such as Ilija Ga‡asanin, remained an insignificant force in early nineteenth-century Serbia. The National Assembly that was convened in 1858, fifteen years after its preceding meeting, to sanction a change of the Prince, was to mark a turning point in the history of liberal propaganda in Serbia. It became the first major political forum from which the platform of Serbian liberalism was publicly announced. On behalf of a small group of deputies, Jevrem Grujic proposed a new bill for the National Assembly whereby the Serbian people was entitled to absolute sovereignty exercised through the assembly, which had to be invested with the supreme legislative powers in all spheres, thus abolishing royal absolutism and establishing control over the executive, which was to be elected by all adult male Serbs. The idea of popular sovereignty, proclaimed for the first time by a handful of Serbian liberals in 1858, in less than a decade would topple the erstwhile norms of political legitimacy and transform entirely the political order in the country. In order to explain how this change became possible and what its significance was, we should refer to the preceding chapter on nation- and state-formation in the Serbian Principality. As we have seen, by the middle of the century—at the time when the Serbian liberals embarked on re-defining the notion of sovereignty and instituting the concept of nation—the practice of luring and “taming” the peasantry by way of obeying its traditional values had already been institutionalized by the newly established state-class. This is a critical factor to be considered in any attempt to define the political as well as the social dimensions of the Balkan transitions to modernity. It is also a

7 8

Idem, p. 38. Jankovi∆, 1951, pp. 109–111; Prodanovi∆, 1947, pp. 257–258.

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key point in any evaluation of the course of action that the nascent “modern-minded” Balkan political elites, regardless of their ideological labels, saw themselves bound to follow in the conditions of a truly representative political system. The peculiar brand of liberal nationalism, which these enfants terribles promoted, holds the key to their far-reaching success. Underlying it was the notion of the inextricable connection between “inner” and “outer” freedom. The latter stood for the characteristic “natural right” of each nationality to a sovereign state: its implementation was the necessary condition for the implementation of the liberal idea of freedom and for releasing the full potential of each nation. It was “the fact that the limbs of [the Serbian and the Greek] peoples have been torn off,” noted the leader of the Habsburg Serbian liberals and the United Serbian Youth, Svetozar Mileti∆, “that the spirit of the entire nation does not have the opportunity to work on its national and political development … [and] that the life of these nations has not yet shown itself in a better light and blossomed into full bloom.” 9 The realization of this right, however, was not sufficient. “We are Serbs and citizens,” Mileti∆ added. Where the government was representative of and acted on behalf of the sovereign people, where monarchic power was limited and the personal rights and freedoms were safeguarded—only there was the state “internally free.” The inner freedom, in turn, was the one which could ensure the “external” unity and greatness of the nation: “only a Serbia endowed with free political institutions is capable of drawing together all Serbs under foreign rule; only in one such Serbia can be released that spirit of national fervor and sacrifice without which no great battles for national liberation can be fought.” 10 The osmotic link between inner freedom, that is, democratic rule, and outer liberation and unification, that is, irredentism, was characteristic of many national-liberal and radical movements in Europe of the nineteenth century. Specifically, this was the connection between domestic reforms in a democratic direction and the nationally unificatory projects, between internal (civic) and external (irredentist) nationalism. The Serbian liberals pursued the de-legitimization of the old regime by accusing it of having produced a state incapable of providing either external or internal freedom. There was no state in the proper sense of the word where it had proved unable to fulfill its “purpose”: “the people in it to be not only externally but also internally free.” 11 The Enlightenment-Romantic lineage of this dialectics of freedom is encoded in a text considered to be the first declaration of liberalism in 9

Mileti∆, 1939. Jovanovi∆, 1923, p. 282. 11 Gruji∆, 1849, pp. 171–172. 10

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Serbia and the foundation of the United Serbian Youth platform. In an article of 1849, “A vision of the state,” the future spokesman of the liberals in the Serbian Assembly, Jevrem Gruji∆, postulated that education for the sake of creating an “enlightened nation” was “vital to enable the Serbian people to free itself from [outward and inward] oppression.” The nature of this education is defined as follows: “The people should, 1) for its outer liberation, make the entire Serbian nation aware of its former empire and its brilliant future; it must also become better acquainted with and more closely linked to the other Slav branches; 2) for its inner liberation, make the nation aware of what it actually is, what rights it should have; what the government is about, why it exists, from whom it exists and what its limits are; the nation must be told what it means to live in a state and it must be called upon to live in that way.” 12 The inscription of the past into the future—in fact, the historical justification of the right to a future—as well as the connection between political education of the nation and education into its origins and character: these were themes as close to the late eighteenth-century Slavicists of the Enlightenment mold as to the nineteenth-century nationalists across Europe. The modernist and the romantic visions of the national community could intermingle in varying proportions and discursive codes, yet the political meta-language within which they co-existed—the language of liberal nationalism—revealed fundamental continuity and coherence all throughout the long nineteenth century. “The Serbs, a witty, gifted, heroic people,” wrote S. Mileti∆ in 1863 in a more emphatic romantic vein, “able to be passionate about a higher idea and lay down their lives for it, with a little more constancy and diligence, which can be cultivated with further cultural development, can stand side-by-side with the best of nations. ... However, the main point is that all Christians have the salient point—punctum saliens—of every higher organism, and it is their national consciousness as the spiritual basis of a nation and political consciousness as the basis of statehood; they have one common thought which unites them and which removes all obstacles in times of crises; an immovable point that rules over the entire motion of national life and does not allow it to break out of its perimeter; that point is a profound feeling that they are a people which has a past and is worthy of the future; a profound feeling of their purpose in the history of European culture and the tendency to draw on and focus their forces and inclinations, no matter how different they might be, on a great thought. The feeling of pride and glory, the feeling of national freedom, both external regarding the state and internal regarding politics and constitution, can uplift Christian peoples to the highest

12

Idem, pp. 175–180.

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level of self-sacrifice. The source of rapture for Christian peoples is not the destructive fanaticism of the Turks, but the will to create—a creative spiritual force…” 13 Although the metaphysics of the national spirit was already in the air, it was not as yet understood as self-sufficient. In order to unleash the nation’s creative potential, it had to merge with the political consciousness and resolve itself into the “national freedom of state, politics and constitution.” The same typological lineage, infused with a considerable amount of populist pathos, was apparent in the definition of internal freedom. At its core, as of the whole Serbian national-liberal doctrine, stood the principle of popular sovereignty. In the words of Jevrem Gruji∆, “[we want] to keep in force that common law, according to which the people is the source and the bearer of all power in Serbia and according to which it exercises this power through its Popular Assembly.” 14 The Serbs’ civil rights, the freedom of property and economic activity were crucial and they had to be safeguarded by a constitution: the ideology of Serbian liberalism was in this respect at one with the normative liberal view of society. However, for such a society to become possible “the general will has to be the supreme law and the unlimited master—it should be the sovereign.” All emblematic values and institutions of the liberal doctrine—the ideas of parliamentary rule, equality in freedom, the rule of law, accountability of the executive—the Serbian liberals extracted from their key precept of the popular sovereignty, the “general will” meaning “the will of all, expressed in general voting, or the vote of each and every one on the basis of freedom,” as their leading theorist, Vladimir Jovanovi∆, put it. It is out of this hierarchy of liberal values that the demands for a unicameral parliament and, even more importantly, for unqualified enfranchisement had emerged and were pushed to the center liberal stage. To the fears of an assembly elected by an illiterate nation, liable to demagoguery and abuses of its extensive powers, they opposed the thesis that political freedom and participation, free elections and press were the best school of political education for the people and a guarantee that it would be represented by the best “sons of the people.” 15 It is at this point that early Serbian liberalism—as yet self-assertive, self-legitimating and rebellious—deviated considerably both from the prevailing or practiced contemporary versions of European liberalism, susceptible to the threats of the “tyranny of the majority,” and from the far more elitist liberalism of the later-date Serbian “Progressivists” who came to power in the early 1880s. 13

Miletic, 1939. Jevrem Gruji∆, Zapisi Jevrema Gruji∆a, II. Beograd, 1923, p. 71. 15 The full elaboration of Serbian liberalism on these lines is to be found in the works of Vladimir Jovanovi∆. Cf. Milan Suboti∆, 1992, pp. 85–92. 14

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What strikes us in this whole political project are not the recognizable “classically liberal” norms, apparently borrowed from the up-to-date constitutionalist theory. Indeed it seems strange at first sight that the well-read liberal reformers deemed these norms suitable for the Balkan social reality. But, as a matter of fact, what they did was to raise the archaic view of the functions of these institutions to the modern notion of popular sovereignty, and to “extract” the norms of the modern state from the institutional traditions of the old self-government system and ancient custom. Discovering little foundation for “Western-type” modernity in their contemporary societies, the liberals turned to national history in “search for the rudiments of the Western liberal institutions and [presentation of] our whole democratic movement as the return of our people to its historical character.” 16 “The Serb expresses his inner freedom … in the areas of community action upon which the community decides freely for itself, [and] his outer freedom in [accepting as] a head of state of Serb origin, a leader who would come from the people and would be its personification,” reads a brochure, first published in French in 1853 by the leaders of the Serbian liberal students in Paris.17 Political liberalism everywhere in the Balkans was an imported creed and format, a hybrid of Western prototypes and indigenous romantic populism drawing upon the veneration of the tradition of popular democracy. The endorsement of a modern concept of the state it sought to achieve by identifying its crucial elements in the “national” past and custom. In order to gain legitimacy and support, the liberal nation-state— the one that stood for the inextricable connection between “internal” and “external” freedom—had to develop naturally from the true but longsuppressed essence of the national past. The moral virtues of the “public Serbian spirit” and the institutional traditions of the patriarchal life were fundamental for Serbia’s development in conformity with the values of modern liberalism and democracy.18 The crucial proof of Serbia’s capability to go democratic were its representative, democratic, “freedom-loving” institutions—they were the embodiment of the genuine nature of the national past. The liberals’ mission was to bring these institutions back to life; their goal to show that they were the bearers of a more authentic tradition than the one of the “supreme elder” or the privileged class. “Though politically divided into four parts,” wrote Vladimir Jovanovi∆, “the Serbian nation remains one, one against the foreign domination as well as against any sort of domestic oppression; one in origin and language, in social habits, in national feeling, in literature, and in all the qualities and energies which consti16

Jovanovi∆, 1934, p. 44. Jevrem Gruji∆, Milovan Jankovi∆, 1853. 18 See Stokes, 1975. 17

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tute its identity.” This cultural coherence and national resilience was drawing upon an inbred collective proclivity that happened to be at the same time liberally enlightened and modern, namely, that “[t]he Serbs are deeply penetrated by the conviction that all men are created equal, that all men and nations have equal natural rights, and that a nation’s right to a separate and independent existence is inviolable under any circumstances.” 19 In a confident positivistic style, V. Jovanovi∆ elaborated on the whole set of popular institutions that nurtured that conviction. “The sentiment of the national freedom and independence, which is indelibly engraved in the hearts of the Serbs, has led them to perpetuate their fellow-feeling by a peculiar institution, such as Pobratimstvo. It is a sacred union between the Serbs of various families, founded upon a resolution of reciprocal self-sacrifice... in struggling for national and human liberty and independence... The enlightenment of the mass, which ought to result from the equality of rights, has always been and still is supported among the Serbs by the traditional institutions of the Slava and the Sabori..., all serving to a continual exchange of ideas, experiments and useful knowledge....” 20 Most notable as hothouses for democratic citizenship were the institutions of the old system of local self-government, principally the communal assemblies. “The Popular Assembly is one of the most ancient and sacred institutions in the Serbian Principality. It embodies the lawful will of the whole Serbian People,” read the liberal draft of the National Assembly Law of 1858.21 The common law of the assembly, claimed its author Gruji∆, was the basis of all institutions of the country and a “requirement” for the life of the people. “The municipal and local selfgovernment is derived from the equality of rights, which is the basis of the democracy,” noted V. Jovanovi∆. “The traditional municipal institutions of the Serbs are free. In its relations with the State the Serbian Commune—Obshtina, such as tradition knows it, is entirely independent. … The Serbian national assembly in its traditional form insures the government of the people by the people equally represented, which is essential in a democracy. To be better understood we add that the national assembly in its form of the traditional and sacred institution is sovereign with a government for its chief officers, so as to preserve for the people the direct control of their own destinies… With the equality of rights, so deeply rooted in the public spirit and incorporated into the traditional institutions of the Serbs, corresponds the equality of duties.” 22

19

Jovanovi∆, 1871, p. 103. Idem, 103 ff. 21 Milicevi∆, 1970, pp. 614–15. 22 V. Jovanovi∆, 1871. 20

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The liberals’ aspiration, as formulated by Jovanovi∆, was the “free arrangement of our state institutions in a popular and democratic spirit, in accordance with the historical precepts… [which] have existed for centuries in the life of our people.” 23 Constitutionalism and representative government were thus directly distilled from the traditions of popular democracy, in a testimony of the maturity of the Serbian people to exercise their “internal freedom.” Individual freedom and freedom of the people, equality before the law and fraternal solidarity were not values alien to the Serb; on the contrary, they were part of the Serbian past and were preserved as ideals by the “popular spirit” throughout the ages of foreign domination. “The old or the genuine organization of the Serbian state was democratic, i.e. it meant that the people governed themselves on the basis of equality before the law and the equal right of all its members,” Jovanovi∆ argued. Serbia’s defeat at Kosovo and the enslavement of the Serbs were the punishment for the Boyars’ (aristocrati) betrayal of the “democratic spirit.” The bureaucratic and autocratic regimes in contemporary Serbia continued to display the “corrupted nature of the Serb” since the country was not dominated by the “democratic spirit, the spirit of the public contract and of the people’s self-government.” 24 The Serbian liberals’ insistence that the “popular Serbian spirit” had been incarnated in and empowered by the institutions of representative democratic rule sprang from the fusion of that spirit with the idea of popular sovereignty—the pivotal emblem of Serbian liberal nationalism and of its understanding of internal freedom. While the idea of property as an attribute of the citizen was no doubt there, its underpinnings were emphatically egalitarian. “What insures the stability of the fraternal union among the Serbs, is the whole of their domestic sentiments which can be resumed in the equality of rights and duties for all the citizens as men... In emancipated Serbia not any distinction of the orders and classes, or any trace of the ancient nobility is to be found. The Serbs are so deeply penetrated by the sentiments of equality and fraternity, as never to be reconciled with any sort of unjust and hereditary distinctions among men. Equality is materially insured among the Serbs by respect of property... Instead of a few thousand proprietors, there are many hundred thousand. The great mass of people has become owners of the soil... The great agglomerations of fortunes are only rare exceptions, the great fortunes are submitted to the law of moveables which dominates the other fortunes, and all sort of aristocratic and noble-man’s privileges, which might serve to a concentration of fortunes into the hands of a small number, are impossible in Serbia. Wealth is in general equitably dis23 24

Cit. in Milan Suboti∆, 1992, p. 91. Vladimir Jovanovi∆, 1870, p. 50. The liberal theory of Serbian history has been most fully developed by V. Jovanovi∆, 1866.

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tributed among the Serbs, so as to ensure that nobody may be rich enough to purchase another, and nobody so poor as to sell himself. Pauperism is entirely unknown in Serbia.” 25 So, by virtue of its traditional economic structure too, particularly its massive “peasant middle class” of a kind inherently averse to privilege and social injustice, Serbia was organically suitable for the norms of political modernity. Other traditional institutions, such as the zadruga (peasant commune), rural community, local self-government, all kinds of collective work, and the collectivistic ethos which they nurtured, were politically instrumentalized with the same radically modern program in mind. “These are the institutions for working in common, for mutual support in labor... But the advantages which follow from such a general concurrence in the time of war are great and momentous beyond all question. Every person, men and women, young and old, in short all who are called Serbs take their share in the affairs of war... The general concurrence in a patriotic war is always accompanied with a general, but voluntary sacrifice of individual interests to the public necessity. ... [E]very Serb delights to be able to prove in time of war that: “All is ours, all is narodsko” (belonging to the whole of the nation).” 26 Predictably, the ultimate repository of this spirit and its virtues was found in epic folklore—the major building block of the mythological poetics of national identity. It was found to testify to the permanence of an ethical code among the Serbs, which provided the “basis of civil virtues” and without which democratic society could not survive. As an embodiment of the collective memory and a preserve of the virtues of “Serbian power and greatness,” epic folklore was re-deciphered into a “reservoir” of nationally psychological testimonies of the Serbs’ ability not just to fight for their freedom but to create a democratic state and abide by the prescriptions of the institutions of liberalism.27 Eventually, Serbia, due to its traditional, patriarchal customs and institutions, noble epics and moral code, democratic spirit and conventions in self-government, was proven to be organically suited for, if not actively creative of, a liberal political and economic order. In the political language of liberal nationalism during the constitutive period of the Serbian modernity, “liberal ideas” and tradition were not seen in a dichotomy.28 It is, at the same time, equally obvious that the liberals 25

Vladimir Jovanovi∆, 1871. Idem. 27 The most informed treatment of the ideology of Serbian liberalism can be found in Stokes, 1975 and Suboti∆. 28 Such a discursive rupture is more relevant for the short-lived ‘liberalism in power’ of the Serbian progressivists who, together with king Milan, espoused a far more forcibly westernizing, elitist version of liberalism, close to that professed by the Romanian liberals. See for example Shemyakin, 2000, pp. 19–46. 26

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in Serbia did not seek to re-install the old patriarchal arrangement preserved by the “popular spirit.” Nor were they traditionalist in any accepted meaning of the term: tradition for them was not an alternative to modernity or a kind of alternative modernity. For them it was the only basis, the fundamental texture from which the viable institutions and guiding principles of the nation-states could evolve. That applied internally as well as externally, since “In the opinion of the Serbs equality is to be understood for all the nations, as well as for all the citizens of one and the same State. They hold it to be self-evident that in international tolerance and brotherhood, the conditions of universal peace must be looked for and consequently the conditions most propitious for the future of the Serbian as well as of any other human society.” 29 The liberal-nationalists’ attempt to attain a synthesis between tradition and modernity ensued, in the final analysis, from their effort to “condense” the historical time needed for the implantation of modern forms of social organization, economic and political freedom in particular, and, most of all, the nation-state.30 The Serbian liberals were ultimately aiming to attune their ambitious program of “progressive reforms” to the local, largely communitarian structures of social organization. “This brief review of manners, habits of thought, modes of feeling, domestic and social life of the Serbs,” Jovanovi∆ closed his chapter on the “National Unity, Liberty and Independence of the Serbs,” “shows that they are democratic at heart. So fondly attached to home and family ties and customs, they are at the same time animated by the spirit of freedom, association and mutual support and self-sacrifice kept alive by a strong feeling of brotherly affection, embracing not only members of the same nationality, but also the various races themselves and strengthened by an ardent desire for the progress of humanity: such is in few words the spirit of the Serbian nation.” 31 This is an exemplary formulation of Balkan liberal nationalism. Jovanovi∆’s aim was, of course, to prove the Serbs’ ability, indeed propensity, for modernity. In doing this, he showed little reverence for distinguishing between the liberal and the romantic, the universal and the particular, the politically modern and the antiquarian. He offered instead a remarkable mixture of classical liberal and citizenship precepts (equality of rights, “enlightenment” for all, equal political representation and local self-government—or democracy, respect for property, rejection of hereditary privilege, principle of association), the language of nationalism (“fraternal union” marked by “origin, language, and national feeling”; national rights, freedom, independence; “voluntary sacrifice of individ29

Vladimir Jovanovi∆, 1871. Suboti∆, 1992, p. 156 makes a similar point by calling this synthesis ‘modernity of backwardness.’ 31 Vladimir Jovanovi∆, 1871. 30

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ual interests to the public necessity”), and romantic celebration of tradition (the “sacred” institutions of pobratimstvo, slava, zadruga, obshtina, and their ethical counterparts—“working in common,” “mutual support,” “community of property,” “all is ‘narodsko,’” egalitarianism). Non nova, sed nove. The liberal nationalists of nineteenth-century Serbia could thus legitimate their project as universal and rational, on the one hand, and local and patrimonial, on the other. It was not the liberals, however, who reaped the fruits of this ingenious concoction. For, having been convinced in their high mission to guard the true, properly understood national interests, the Serbian liberals felt little need to heed the opinions of this “peasant nation” or to teach it the practicalities of belonging to it. This need would be grasped by their opponents to the “left”—the assertively populist Serbian Radicals—whose stunning mass appeal would owe as much to a ruthless fight against the liberals’ modernizing policies as to the far-reaching implications of the liberals’ theoretical ingenuity.

IV. Bulgarian liberalism, in its various genres, bore several generic similarities to the Serbian brand. But its accents were in many ways different, and for primarily two reasons: the lack, until as late as 1878, of a Bulgarian national state or any kind of autonomous political institutions and the presence of competitors, endowed with such states, vying for the inheritance of Turkey-in-Europe, as the Balkan part of the Ottoman Empire came to be known. It was the former characteristic above all that accounted for the deepest internal division between the Bulgarian liberals: that between the reformist, or dualist, camp and the revolutionary, or secessionist, one. Whatever resemblances they might be sharing, the division over the political goals of liberal reformism led to a virtual warfare between the two camps and left its strong imprint upon their respective interpretations of what came to constitute Bulgarian liberal thought. It is therefore important to look more closely at each of them, drawing, for our purposes, upon the prolific polemical writings of the two leading figures of Bulgarian liberal nationalism: Petko R. Slaveykov and Lyuben Karavelov. The reformist outlook, whose most eloquent and popular spokesman Slaveykov was, was shaped by two fundamental premises: the preeminence of the Greek nationalist threat and the need for consolidation of Bulgarian nationality within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. The two were mutually contingent to a large extent. For the whole liberalreformist camp, the prime danger to the Bulgarian national “awakening” and survival were the assimilationist policies of the Greek clergy of the Constantinople Patriarchate and the Greek schools, both increasingly supported by the aggressive youthful Greek Kingdom. Indeed, the

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transformation of Bulgarian nationalism into a broader movement with a characteristic social and cultural message took place in the course of the struggle for a Bulgarian church—such that would be administered by a Bulgarian Synod and manned by a Bulgarian clergy. And the first major victory which the Bulgarian national cause won was not over the Ottoman central power but over the Greek-dominated Patriarchate of Constantinople by way of procuring from the sultan a firman (legal act) for the establishment of an autocephalous Church, the Bulgarian Exarchate, in 1871. Any “radical change of affairs in Turkey” while that critical battle was on, Slaveykov and his fellows believed, would pose the threat of confronting “the future political right of the Greek element over the whole of the Ottoman Empire, over us and over the other nationalities.” The “backwardness and senility” of the Empire—the invariable targets of the radical-secessionists’ attacks against the political status quo—turned into the greatest benefits in the liberal-reformist scheme. The “true national interests,” wrote Slaveykov in 1867 in support of the dualist project, require that the Bulgarian nationality side with the ruling Turkish element which “albeit not free of certain deficiencies, we believe will continue, due to its religion and position, to be the most neutral towards our proper national affairs, the most fair to us and which, due to certain worn-out and obsolete idea so alien to the contemporary epoch, keeps its moral and material interests isolated from those of the other nationalities inhabiting the empire.” 32 The “worn-out and obsolete idea” in question was embodied in the Ottoman “representative system” which had left the Christian communities, churches and schools to be governed by their “popular leaders and patriarchs.” If that civic and religious self-rule, generally known as the millet system—the one that “had preserved and developed our [national] identity [nashata lichnost]”— had been in time corrupted, the guilt fell on the Greeks and on their social and ethnic abuses, not on the Ottomans who had remained faithful to communal autonomy. Any disruption of the multiethnic imperial rule would expose the incipient Bulgarian self to the “abuses of a foreign [Greek] community” and to “political extinction.” The liberal-reformist obsession with “Grecomania,” the Bulgarian Church and school issues—with the “Greek threat” in general—was the result of an imperative to define the Bulgarian identity and rights vis-àvis an assertive rival nationalism rather than against a reigning yet prenationalist imperial power. The defense of the empire, moreover, was seen to be in the interest of the national economy, for its markets ensured far better chances for prosperity, whilst “the starved and the poor rarely

32

“Iztalkuvanieto” [The Explication], Makedoniya, I, 12, 18 Feb. 1867

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are of use to the fatherland.” 33 It is indeed significant that a champion of the pragmatic policy of propping up an inefficient, anachronistic imperial regime should become one of the emblems of Bulgarian nationalism. However, Slaveykov’s loyalty to the “pre-modern” Ottoman Empire was not purely tactical: it was also consistent with his evolutionaryorganicist views about development and human nature. These views were as much enlightenedly liberal as they were constructivisticly nationalist in inspiration and purpose, as was Slaveykov’s whole political vocabulary. Freedom in his reading incorporated the whole set of liberal values commonly defined as the “spirit of the century” or the “driving force of the age”: “unlimited success, development, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and mind, personal freedom, freedom of discussion and thrust for a bright future…, the perfection of this world, the brotherhood, equality and independence of the public and the private.” 34 The political implementation of freedom had a rationalistic and a cultural aspect. On the one hand, it was a “natural condition” of human beings as “endowed with a free will.” On the other hand, although the moderatereformist liberals stopped short of calling for political rupture, their repeated demands for effective equality of the empire’s nationalities on the basis of self-government and inviolability of national rights gave clear indication of the kind of society they had in mind as a subject of the rational free will.35 Freedom in this double employment, furthermore, was unthinkable without the rule of law, meaning “the enjoyment of such safety as to allow each citizen to pursue … the complete exercise of his natural rights.” 36 Finally, freedom was an asset “only when those, who aspire to it or have achieved it, are capable and know how to enjoy it in practice.” Consequently, the positive practicing of freedom, albeit a natural right, was not a natural talent. Instead it was the result of learning and exercise— and the best political school that could train the nation to make use of the “public political welfare” was local self-government, the practice of “communal freedom.” 37 For the Bulgarian liberals, as in newly created 33

“Lyubopitstvoto i dlazhnostite” [On Curiosity and Duties], Makedoniya, I, 13, 1 Apr. 1867; “Minaloto, segashnoto i budushteto” [The past, present and future], Makedonoya, III, 3, 14 Dec. 1868. 34 “Nakade navalyat narodite v Evropa [What the Nations of Europe Aspire For],” Makedoniya, I, 33, 15 July 1867. 35 “Politicheskii duh na savremennata istoriya [The Political Spirit of Contemporary History],” Makedoniya, I, 35, 29 July 1867; “Narodnost [Nationality],” Makedoniya, I, 37, 12 Aug. 1867. 36 “Obshtestveniya red i svobodata” [Public Order and Freedom], Makedoniya, I, 11, 11 Feb. 1867. 37 “Prakticheskata svoboda” [The Practical Freedom], Makedoniya, II, 51, 18 Nov. 1868.

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Serbia and other places in Eastern Europe, the political practice of liberalism came to signify the fusion of enlightenment ideas with pre-existent, traditional forms of self-government. Political modernity in the Balkans was, as a matter of fact, in a large measure the result of this fusion. Comparable in rationale was the interpretation of the constitutive liberal “principle of advancement”—the Progress—typically understood as vital and universal “for all peoples, since to advance means to live in accordance with the laws of the rational human nature.” 38 Far from harming public life, self-love was “the source and the cause of the highest and self-sacrifying deeds.” 39 The real human vice was not egotism but ignorance: to Slaveykov and to the Bulgarian liberals in general, the key to the realization of all liberal values and to the improvement of the human condition was education. The benefits of knowledge and education were as visible in the economic field as they were indispensable for the “political well-being” of any society. In tune with Jevrem Gruji∆ and the liberals in Serbia, P. R. Slaveykov regarded “popular education”— that of “the higher and the lower ranks” of society—as a prerequisite for the exercise of freedom. Yet again, education’s liberating mission was basically intended to secure not individual freedom as a value in itself but “the well-being of any state, the prosperity of any nation,” because “without being internally independent man can never be externally independent.” This meant that “each nation should have its proper [national] enlightenment … [and] that each nation can survive and advance only in its proper nature, i.e. in its national education.” 40 The same was true for industrial development—the one next to education in the list of the engines of progress. If industry was “the strongest driving force of well-being,” that was above all because “through it alone the national self-reliance and independence is reinforced.” There was therefore a direct correlation between the ability for social improvement, that is, progress, and the implementation of the principle of nationality; nations could make decisive steps in their advancement “only when they are conscious of themselves” and of their proper interests.41

38

“Postanovleniyata i naredbite za napredvane” [The Enactments and Rules of Advancement], Makedoniya, II, 38, 17 July 1868. 39 “Ot samolyubieto li ili ot nevezhestvoto iztichat niskite raboti? [Are Measly Affairs the Consequence Of Self-Love or Of Ignorance?], Makedoniya, IV, 71, 4 Aug. 1871. 40 “Obrazovanieto” [Education], Gayda, III, 10, 15 May 1866; “Narodnoto obrazovanie i narodnoto duhovenstvo” [National Education and National Clergy], Makedoniya, I, 51, 18 Nov. 1867; “Narodno vazpitanie” [National Upbringing], Makedoniya, II, 4, 23 Dec. 1867. 41 “Uchenieto i industriyata” [Learning and Industry], Makedoniya, IV, 23, 7 Feb. 1870; “Narodnost” [Nationality], Makedoniya, I, 37, 12 Aug. 1867.

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The full value of both education and industry, at the same time, was measured with the yardstick of national elevation and prosperity, their ultimate justification was the status of the nation: “No nation nowadays can pursue an honourable policy, enjoy full political freedom and independence, strengthen and win recognition for its reputation unless it is rich, unless it has developed its industry… Nowadays the glory and the power are not in the hands of the learned nor in those of the strong or the destructive, but in [the hands of] the richest and the most productive of all nations, because industry had changes, so to say, the face of the world. Power and supremacy had shifted and the laws and mutual relations among nations had been transformed…” 42 It is precisely the logical sequence of this distinctly liberal line of reasoning that would ultimately lead all Balkan liberals at the head of their young states to their most serious betrayal of the liberal politicaleconomic doctrine: the state-administered protection of their nascent industries from the free market. The assimilation of the universal into the national was the major hallmark in all that—and of the age in general as liberal protagonists of all kinds liked to point out. The practical accommodation of any universal principle, Slaveykov asserted, “should conform to the national needs and the features of the national spirit”: “The essence of certain rules may be identical for all nations, but the outward form under which they occur should be of a peculiar type for each nation, matching its individual peculiarity.” 43 The Bulgarians should beware against begetting a civilization that would be a sheer emulation, the seed bequeathed to them by their fathers should bear a peculiar fruit, and peculiar would it become by the influence of the national spirit and character; advancement must be based “on that which is our own and proper,” it must be “our proper job and carry our proper image.” 44 This is an interesting inversion of the relationship between tradition and modernity as it was elaborated in the Serbian case. For V. Jovanovi∆, tradition (its values and institutions) was not something valuable in itself; rather it was the propitious foundation upon which the modernity

42

“Uchenieto i industriyata” [Learning and Industry], Makedoniya, IV, 23, 7 Feb. 1870. 43 However great and respected the reforms of Peter the Great, Slaveykov exemplified his thesis, their alien external form had ever since produced advancement only among “official Russia” whilst the Russian people had remained undisturbed in their “lethargic dream”—“Postanovleniyata i naredbite za napredvane” [The Enactments and Rules of Advancement], Makedoniya, II, 38, 17 July 1868. 44 “Vsintsa nashi za nas si” [All of Us for Ourselves], Makedoniya, I, 33, 15 July 1867.

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construction could step. Slaveykov had similarly discovered a fundamental accord between the principle of decentralization, “for which Europe is still fighting,” and the “domestic arrangement of our national life” based on the deep-rooted communal self-rule which was nurturing an “individual, that is self-conscious sentiment, feeding each Bulgarian with a self-relying spirit.” 45 For him, however, tradition (“national life,” “popular needs,” “national spirit”) was not to the same extent instrumental in validating a radically modern project as it was the one and only available resource of defining and protecting the Bulgarians’ national identity. The difference in emphasis, in other words, emerged from two differing political agendas involving the association between liberalism and collective identity: the Serbian liberals sought to legitimate their modern identity constructivism in a situation of liberally endorsed authority of the nation-state; for their Bulgarian counterparts, as yet deprived of any such levers, the prime concern was the definition of the national self in the face of powerful universalistic and foreign nationalistic pressures. What we are confronted with in both cases is the notorious dilemma of nineteenth-century nationalists—a dilemma which, due to already noted reasons, was even more acutely felt by the Bulgarian than the Serbian liberals. P. R. Slaveykov eloquently illustrates that controversial stance between the values (and assigned functions) of tradition and the drive to “become” modern (or, as the time-honored metonymy had it, European) as essentially antinomic to tradition. He criticized the unprincipled emulators of the West from rigidly democratic, egalitarian positions in that he saw them as being different from the people “in words and dress,” severed from the people’s life and needs, looking down on them as a “stack of silly creatures” and aiming to put themselves above them. In their striving to show themselves as Europeans, these new notables were demolishing “national patriarchal simplicity and modesty,” the ultimate depository of all national virtues.46 The concern was clear and shared by many: the unpredictable, if not outright dangerous, implications of “Europeanization” for the arduously constructed and politically contested national identity. The blind aspiration to catch up with the foreigners and to become apparently as they are had driven the Bulgarians to despise all that was their own: the more they were allegedly moving ahead, the more they were moving away from the life of their ancestors and approaching their ruin. The magnitude of the drama becomes apparent when Slaveykov names the ultimate 45

“Gradovete i selata edni za drugi” [The Towns and the Villages in Relation to Each Other], Makedoniya, III, 50, 1 Nov. 1869. 46 “Petna v nashiya obshtestven zhivot” [Blemishes in Our Public Life], Makedoniya, V, 4, 26 January 1871.

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danger: “to cease to exist as a people—we who are only just beginning to revive our national life!” 47 This discourse had no match in the political language of nineteenthcentury Serbian liberalism—neither during its initial, idealist phase nor, and least of all, after coming to power. There it was forged and spread with remarkable success by the liberals’ political heirs and rivals to the left—the radical-populist, narodnik nationalists around Nikola Pasi∆—who were quick to realize the huge mobilizational potential inherent in it. Slaveykov’s anxiety, however, was rooted in an essentially liberal not socialist line of reasoning, thus anticipating the somber diagnosis of future modernizers about the effects of non-organic progress. At its root it was not rhetoric which was at stake, of course. If the unavoidable corollary of the admiration for Europe was the recognition that your own flock is “most inferior, most vulgar, most silly,” as did one of the revivalist writer D. Voynikov’s characters, what should then be the choice of the national “awakener”? Here we are faced with the necessity intrinsic to the modernity project—and with the intellectual and practical tension resulting from it—for the national identity to define itself vis-à-vis the universalistic claims of the Enlightenment and liberalism. The dilemma had one more, closely related aspect aptly framed by the Serbian anthropologist Sl. Naumovi∆: “…in order to preserve their cultural identity, i.e. their sense of nationhood, in the face of military, economic, and cultural “superpowers” or threatening neighbours [East European nationalists] had to imitate the very oppressors or potential aggressors they hoped to overcome, and in that way undermined their own foundations in the way of their fathers. Thus, there was a double sense of ambivalence to overcome, stemming from two rejections to be made—that of the foreign dominator for which the only way was his overcoming by standards he himself introduced, as well as that of the traditions of the ancestors, which had to be cherished as symbols of identity, but had also to be considered as obstacles to a desired future.” 48 That the issue at hand was typically a modernity-driven dilemma becomes apparent not just in terms of a theoretically informed retrospective reading, but—far more importantly—in terms of the way in which “those concerned” articulated it at the time. The anxiety over the survival of the national self was one aspect; the other was the standard for “true Europeanization” on behalf of which the defenders of tradi47

Chtlalishte, III, 1872, 1, 31. To be sure, there were some, like Rajko Zhinzifov, who opposed all sorts of cultural import (dress, dances, languages, foreign words) from an openly Slavophile position in the name of the conservation of traditional patriarchality. 48 “Romanticists or Double Insiders? An Essay on the Origins of Ideologised Discourses in Balkan Ethnology,” Ethnologia Balkanica, Vol. 2 (1998), 113.

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tion criticized the indiscriminate import of Western “forms.” “We live in Europe,” Slaveykov said, “but we are not European… We see and aspire to progress, but we still do not understand the foundations on which it rests and the means by which it is set in motion. Deeds and not words, or to put it more simply, it takes working, not talking… These and other things we have not as yet understood; and, above all, that what is needed is labor, working, activity, vigor!… As for now, with our clothes, with our ridiculous claims to Europeanness (“evropeystvo”) we are nothing but an anachronism in Europe.” 49 One cannot help but note the empathy, and the somewhat ironic consistency, between Slaveykov’s peasant-reared patriarchality, quasi-protestant reverence for “simplicity and modesty” and utilitarian predilection for “deeds, not words.” Laterday radical Westernizers would have little to disagree with such “traditionalist” critiques. The theoretical and practical problem, however, would remain the same: what is the yardstick for measuring authentic modernity and what is the value which should ultimately justify it? The axiological relation between the universalistic and the local was “self-consciously” explicated—and a solution apparently found. In an article published in one of the most respectable revivalist journals of the early 1870s, “The Duty of the Citizen,” patriotism (“otechestvolyubie” or “love for the fatherland”) was counterposed to both the private (“love for the family”) and the universalistic (“love for mankind” or “cosmopolitanism”). For the anonymous author of the article it was easier to prove that love for the family required love for the fatherland than to prove that the latter was superior to the love for all men. Seeking “equal civil government for the entire world” was, of course, a duty of “each good person,” but wasn’t it still too early for mankind to make such a jump? At any rate, “in order to get that far one has to go through the love for the fatherland and for the nation and not the other way around; and obviously: how can one love the entire world, all the people if one has not yet learned how to love his fatherland and his people?” 50 P. R. Slaveykov had already presaged this organic connection from apparently universalistic and humanitarian positions. The Bulgarians should “love mankind in general” since “the whole of mankind is nothing but one big family.” The members of this universal family were living in constant interaction, especially in contemporary times, but they were doing so not individually but as members of other “natural” families—nations, the love for which was the ultimate source of human virtue and perfection. “A perfect man should lay down a lot for humankind; but for his fatherland and his nation (narod) he should lay down his possessions,

49 50

Gayda, III, 7, 1 April 1866 (Sachineniya, V, 229) Chitalishte, III (1872-1873), pp. 335–336.

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his well-being, his glory, his life, his posterity and all—he should lay down everything … Outside the realm of nationality (narodnost) and national education there is no greatness, no well-being, no future for any nation in Europe and the whole world. Let us not forget that high principle: the perfect man does not love his nation and his fatherland but is one who is a citizen such as his fatherland can be proud of.” 51 Slaveykov’s definition of nationality and nation (narodnost, narod— terms etymologically related in Bulgarian to ‘kin’ and ‘folk’) deserves special attention. Not because it is particularly lucid but because it again combines, in an essentially similar way to the Serbian liberal case, quite disparate paradigms. The national community to him was a natural, organic whole with a “life of its own, it feels, it thinks and expresses its thoughts.” Although not lacking in tangible traits, it was not easily defined in wholly rational or material terms: its existence was undeniable yet ineffable. On the one hand, the nation was a community of “people connected between themselves by language, origins, mores, by some common moral qualities, by a common feeling, by same strivings, same desires to have a common government. In addition, the shared past political life, the same national history therefore common memories, national pride and national humiliation … all that testifies to the existence of a nationality, whether or not it has political independence.” 52 Most salient among all these attributes was language, whose reading as the supreme expression of a “nation’s power and mind” was remarkably Herderian in morphology.53 On the other hand, however, nationality was not lying ready at hand; it was not an obvious given. What was infusing life in the community of one nationality was the awareness of its existence. “National consciousness!,” Slaveykov exclaimed in a romantic tenor reminiscent of Svetozar Mileti∆’s, “– Here is the main force which revives the nationalities, which strengthens them, brings them to their senses, drives them towards improvement of their social condition, fills them with the most noble thoughts and feelings…” 54

51

“Otechestvolyubie, Rodolyubie i chovekolyubie” [Love for the Fatherland, Love for Your Kin and Love for Humankind], Gayda, III, 15-16, 1 and 15 Aug. 1866. 52 “Narodnost” [Nationality], Makedoniya, I, 37, 12 Aug. 1867. 53 According to Slaveykov, “in and through [the language] the scale and depth of the nation’s mind, the strength of its mental power and the heights of its imagination are growing. By learning a language, man is learning the living wisdom of a nation” (“Opravdanie i svestyavane” [Justification and Awakening], Makedoniya, II, 11, 10 Feb. 1868). 54 “Opravdanie i svestyavane” [Justification and Awakening], Makedoniya, II, 6, 9, 10, 11, Jan.-Feb. 1868.

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However, the agents of this self-awareness in the pre-state framework of Bulgarian nationalism presented a serious problem which could not be solved but at the cost of yet another “anomaly” to the doctrine. The liberal-reformists and the liberal-radicals alike envisaged a kind of national leadership which was at once an augur of the nation’s aspirations and its educator, such that would “embody the national spirit” and at the same time “enlighten and lead national opinion.” 55 However, the one “nation-wide” institution, capable of chaneling these leaders’ message to the whole community, was the church. Hence the inverted and atypical “anticlericalism” of the Bulgarian liberal nationalists. The “national clergy”—in fact the figure of the “enlightened and patriotic clergy”—being closest to the people, to the “nation’s thought and strivings,” was that steering group which was entrusted with the key mission to sow light, knowledge and national consciousness, even science, to open schools and promote freedom. “Faith” and “enlightenment” could thus happily intermingle, as they often did in nationalist texts even by liberal moralists such as Slaveykov, who was apparently untroubled by the corrupting impact this association was having on the “blind belief in the supernatural foundations of faith itself.” 56 The administration of the separate Bulgarian Church, set up in 1871, was accordingly looked at as a major school for training and exercising the competence in democratic government by all brands of Bulgarian nationalists, especially the most radical among them. Political radicalism indeed was what primarily accounted for the more extreme articulation of both Enlightenment and nationalist themes by the opposing liberal camp. Lyuben Karavelov elaborated its platform and philosophy in numerous articles published mostly in the emigré revolutionary press. Despite their educationist convictions, the “left liberals” were predictably far less preoccupied with peaceful transformations. For them the ecclesiastical controversy and the whole movement for secession from the Greek Patriarchate was only the first phase in the march towards the ultimate fulfillment of national awakening and selfawareness. Its real meaning, to a large extent retrospectively conceded, was to serve as a mobilizational prologue to the genuine transformation: the all-Balkan liberating revolution, the complete purge of the Ottoman power in Europe and the erection upon its ruins of a liberally constituted federation of all Balkan peoples. The notion of political freedom in Karavelov was a vanguard but also a complex one. Above all it meant a radical political break: “Rev55 56

“Narodnoto mnenie” [National Opinion], Makedoniya, I, 58, 19 Aug. 1867. “Narodnoto obrazovanie i narodnoto duhovenstvo” [National Education and National Clergy], Makedoniya, I, 51, 18 Nov. 1867; “Dvete kasti i vlasti” [The Two Castes and Powers], Makedoniya, VI, 18, 27 July 1872.

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olution, revolution and again revolution is our rescue, nothing else,” he insisted, often directly confronting the dualist reasoning “à la Deak” by the reformist liberal faction. “There is no other salvage for us and there cannot be… Almost everything hinges on our political freedom: once we have it, then the church question and all other small and big questions will be resolved by themselves. The times had changed and nations nowadays are seeking something different.” 57 Next, political freedom implied reliance on the nation’s own forces and efforts rather than seeking help from the powerful states of Europe. There was no other way to prove the nation’s capability of defending its own interests and rights therefore its “ripeness for a free political life.” Starting from J. S. Mill’s dictum that the freedom of a nation is the outcome of the faculties, energy and self-reliance of its individual members, Karavelov never ceased to preach that “freedom is not bestowed, freedom is conquered”; “we want to be free therefore we need no tutorship.” In a caustic polemical style, he used to point to the mixed blessing of great-power interventions in favor of the Balkan Christians, including the most benevolent and aggressively anti-Ottoman among them, Russia. Karavelov’s Balkan Realpolitik vis-à-vis the outmatching strength of the Ottoman Empire, however, nicely harmonized with his liberal-democratic predilections: the “Oriental beast” and national oppression could only be vanquished by the unified forces of all Balkan Christians— Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Bulgarians and Greeks—because they had a common cause, “personal and national freedom,” and a common enemy, “the two barbarian and inhuman states, that is Turkey and Austria.” The subsequent safeguard of the freedom thus achieved—the “kingdom of liberty, equality and humanity” built upon the ruins of the two oppressive states—would be assigned to a “Danubian federation” of all those nations, whose constitution would follow that of Switzerland.58 His hostile and occasionally cynical attitude to repressive empires and European great-power politics went hand in hand with his unreserved admiration for the Swiss federalism and the North American democracy. The summary of his liberal-national credo he formulated himself: “A lasting, felicitous and progressive state can only be the one which: 1. is made up of one nationality or at least one kinfolk (pleme) possessing the same mores, customs and religion; 2. is built upon liberal principles, such as [those of] the United States, Switzerland and Belgium.” 59 The said liberal principles were meant to ensure the “freedom, nationality

57

Svoboda newspaper, I, 32, 27 June 1870; II, 26, 10 Dec.1871. Svoboda, I, 14, 5 Feb. 1870; I, 30, 10 June 1870; I, 49, 11 Nov. 1870; I, 51, 2 Dec.1870; I, 35, 22 July 1870; II, 9, 27 Feb. 1871. 59 Svoboda, I, 42, 16 Sept. 1870. 58

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(narodnost) and individual self (svoyata licnost)” of fifty-million Christians, living under Ottoman and Habsburg rule, and be incarnated in a “brotherly federation [constituted] on [an] entirely liberal basis.” This federation would be built upon each nationality’s autonomy and selfgovernment, proper laws and kinfolk life, while respecting the same rights for the other nationalities. The one exception from this broadminded arrangement was the Turks: they could remain in their places of living but had to succumb to the new “Christian laws.” The unity of the political whole would be represented by a common parliament, elected by all constitutive nationalities, whose functions however would be limited to “foreign policy and nothing more.” 60 Many of these national-democratic and federalist themes are easy to locate in a broader intellectual and political setting. Karavelov was a close collaborator of the Serbian Youth liberals, especially of their exiled leaders Svetozar Mileti∆ and Vladimir Jovanovi∆. His attraction to the ideas of South Slav unity and federation as the supreme embodiment of “external freedom,” and to “liberty, public security [rule of law], national selfgovernment and low state taxes” as the keys to a nation’s “internal freedom” and prosperity had a lot to do with this personal connection and ideological affinity. However, Karavelov’s political project was clearly more radical and modernistic in an institutional and constructivist sense as it was in rhetorical style: he cared little about the social or cultural base for his liberal activism and not at all about its embeddedness in tradition. His choice of political standard-bearers and progressive exemplars to complement his revolutionary federalist designs helps us to capture the scale of this kind of optimistic liberal constructivism. Thus, unlike most nineteenth-century “revivalists,” the nationalists of the Karavelov type cherished little reverence for “Europe” as a metonymy of modernity and progress. In Karavelov’s case, it was not Europe with its dynasties and nobilities, rigid state and social structures and antiquated politics that could set the model for the young and vigorous nations. Such a model instead he saw in the United States: American education, democracy, federalist government, rationalism, scientific and technological vigor, contempt for antiquarianism—all these appealed strongly to Karavelov’s utilitarian, rationalist and liberal-nationalist nature. Switzerland and America were to him “the West” where “human happiness” had materialized—and it had done so because there and only there it rested on “pure human freedom”; “Let the Turks seek French civilization and emulate the French as they [the Turks] have no need for science and knowledge…” 61 60

Svoboda, II, 11, 13 March 1871; “Shto iskat balgarite [What do the Bulgarians Seek?],” Svoboda, I, 27, 14 May 1870. 61 Zastava, IV (1869), 35 (Sabrani sachinenija, VII, 58); Svoboda, I (1870), 11.

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It is again from this rigorous position that the revolutionary camp launched its many-sided attacks on Europe, including, not quite commonly at that time, socially addressed ones: “We know all too well that this same Europe that prides herself to Asia and Africa on her progress and her great learning, even today is still preparing in her schools soldiers, Jesuits and learned theologists, i.e. even today she is straying onto winding roads and wants to keep down the common people and to use it as a cow…” 62 At the hands of pragmatic leaders like Karavelov—and these were the militants that gained the upper hand in the national movements and later took the reigns of the Bulgarian state—“Europe” lost any intrinsic coherence beyond that of mutually conspiring or warring giants, participating in a game of a different order and, as a matter of principle, posing a threat to the survival and well-being of small nations. Contributions to culture, progress and civilization, however, were usually explained in nationally historicised, not universalistic terms. The related opposite side of this political radicalism was the almost transcendental vision of the oppressor, over and above cultural or civilizational differences. The imperial rule of the Turks, the Germans and the Magyars was equally intolerable and anachronistic in an age of liberty and nationality. There were some differences in degree though. Echoing Montesquieu’s deterministic taxonomy, extended by the intrinsic incompatibility of Islam with the notion of human equality and rights, especially of women, he found “that the Turk is incapable of civilization and progress….” In fact, Karavelov used to state bluntly that for the Turk to gain access to “humanity,” he should cease to be a Turk.63 The Hungarians, within the same line of arguing, did not fare much better: to that very day, they had “preserved their Asiatic fanaticism and their Asiatic stagnancy” and had proved “incapable of benefitting from the European movement and from human progress and civilization.” As for the Germans, “we are aware that there is a great similarity between Austria and Turkey; the difference is only in that the Germans want to hold their sway over other nationalities through their education, whilst the Turks, who are incapable of any education, prevent also their subjects from moving ahead.” 64 The conceptual circle in which Karavelov’s argument evolved deserves some attention. It defines his brand of liberalism as in many ways more rationalistic and utilitarian—more “enlightened”—than that of the liberal reformists. Karavelov’s attitude to Ottoman rule and the Turks, 62

“Kakvo e Prosveskenije?” [What is Enlightenment?], Nezavisimost, III, 39, 16 June 1873. 63 Svoboda, I, 18, 5 March 1870; I, 9, 4 Jan. 1870; I, 20, 22 March 1870; I, 44, 30 Sept. 1870; II, 3, 17 Jan. 1870. 64 Svoboda II, 14, 3 Apr. 1871; I, 42, 16 Sept. 1870.

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and by extension to the Magyars, was in a crucial sense one towards a Slavic “Middle Age.” It was strongly reminiscent of the Enlightenment vision of that period of history as intrinsically irrational and dark—as a “non-history”—while premising its true beginning and prognosticating the right to a future on the establishment of the rule of reason. Although more passionately articulated by Karavelov, Slaveykov’s refutation of the Rousseauian attraction to “primitiveness” as well as his thesis, fully shared by all liberals, that only those in tune with the spirit of the age qualified for “inclusion in History,” echoed the same vision: that before modern science and development occurred, there was no real history worthy to be considered; before becoming self-conscious and setting on the road of progress, one cannot talk of rationally acting human beings and nations. The left-liberal nationalists such as Karavelov, however, were more consistently championing this radical identity vision. First, because their political agenda made it possible for them to establish an equation between barbarity, superstition, “anti-reason” and the Muslim Turk. National secession and political self-rule were thus presented as a matter of individual and collective salvation, not of choice; therefore, dualism and Ottoman reformism were nothing but deadly delusions. Moreover, the reformist camp preserved, along with its reverence for education, a certain respect for the pre-Ottoman medieval Bulgarian state—at least as a medium of political legitimization. Not so for the radical camp. “Historical right, Byzantine Empire, Simeon’s Kingdom, Dusan’s Crown and so on, have no place where there is a search for liberty and life. […] In our 19th century, both the historical and the canonical right had lost any meaning, and each nation should be free, much as each human being is supposed to be, and each nationality has the full right to live on its own and to develop the heritage bequeathed by its ancestry… The old and dead times have no importance for the living nations which in our time are existing and moving ahead. […] It is only when a nation becomes unable to develop and to move ahead that it rummages into the records of the past and searches for some historical and canonical rights which the healthy and strong nations do not in the least care about.” 65 The radical nationalists’ views about the assignment of education and knowledge were closely linked to this attitude to past and history. What the Bulgarians needed was modern and rational not classical education—“a positive, genuine, human science,” a knowledge “based on mathematical facts” and serving “the truths needed by each rational being.” Education in classical literature and philosophy was obsolete

65

“Moi bratya” [My Brothers], Narodnost, II, 16, 9 March 1869; Svoboda, I, 4, 26 Nov. 1869; I, 7, 17 Dec. 1869; Svoboda, II, 8, 20 Feb. 1871.

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and futile, utterly irrelevant in the contemporary age. It was science which lead man to his well-being and fulfillment and showed the road to human freedom, happiness and wealth. The kind of knowledge “capable of raising a nation and to make it fulfilled and great … we could seek among the Germans, the English and the Americans, and by no means in Paris.” For that reason, the mission of the popular schools was to teach those “sacred truths which are able to undeceive mankind of its delusions, to acquaint it with the laws of nature, to develop its mental abilities and equip it with the means to improve its moral and material condition and achieve a safer life. In short, the school is obliged to prepare honest, diligent, prosperous, free and fulfilled citizens,” while any subject of learning “which counsels you to believe instead of think is harmful.” 66 Once again the generic Enlightenment strain of thought can hardly be mistaken. However, Karavelov’s vision about what constituted the perennial ingredients of the national self, similar to Slaveykov’s, was far more ambivalent in terms of intellectual sources and phraseology. We have already seen that he refused any validity to historical right as a basis for staking modern political claims. He also affirmed that both nations and individuals could not progress as long as they were unable to reject the idea that any relic that had survived from a long past was good and worthy of preservation.67 But, Karavelov also insisted, “the Bulgarians should have their own national development, their own internal self-rule corresponding to their national customs and character because Bulgaria has its own history (not a political but a national one).” Hence drawing as close to the Serbs, for example, as to form a singular nation was “not possible, as that would breach the freedom of the nation and the freedom of man.” 68 Each nation was destined to a unique historical life which an external force might accelerate or retard but never extinguish.69 Significantly, the need for organic development of the national collectivity was also validated, as was the rejection of historical right, with the spirit of the age and the values of the “civilized world”: in the nineteenth century, all pre-existent rights had surrendered to the freedom and the rights of the individual; yet it was also the century when each nationality sought to “rule itself according to its proper rights and customs and to protect its language and identity from foreign influence.” 70 To dispel any hesitation as to the tradition he identified himself with, Karavelov traced the genealogy of his political philosophy to the 66

Svoboda, I, 11, 18 Jan. 1870; I, 4, 26 Nov. 1869; Nezavisimost, IV, 41, 27 July 1874. 67 Svoboda, I, 3, 19 Nov. 1869. 68 “Kakvo ni tryabva?” [What Do We Need?], Zastava, IV, 32, 14 March 1869. 69 Svoboda, I, 32, 27 June 1870. 70 Libertatea, 3, 20 Jan. 1871; Svoboda, II, 24, 27 Nov. 1871.

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“free-thinking principles of the 18th century, principles which opened the road to the new concepts [of nationality]” and which were first won through in Serbia and Greece followed by “1848 in Austria, the Italian war and the question of Schleswig-Holstein.” 71 Various styles of thinking about national identity were thus permeating each other. There was, the tendency to treat human nature as an eternal constancy liable to variations only by force of natural causes: Karavelov was convinced that if Newton or Voltaire had been born in Persia they would have delved into reading the shah’s fate in the stars.72 The notion of historical experience as formative of a nation’s character was, somewhat contradictorily, present too: “Once upon a time the Bulgarians, as all other peoples and nationalities [narodnosti] had not been such as they are now,” Karavelov began his study on the “Bulgarian enlighteners” Cyril and Methodius, the Byzantine fathers of the Cyrillic alphabet.73 Finally, the cultural conception of nationality coupled with the requirement for organic development threw the bridge to the romantic style. Yet, in the final analysis, it was liberal optimism rather than romantic anxiety that prevailed. Unlike “poets of the people” such as P. R. Slaveykov, liberal-revolutionary nationalists such as Karavelov saw little reason for concern on the subject of Western imports and emulation— the ultimate measuring rod of the brand of national modernity the various liberals stood for: “When a nation is undergoing a revival and a striving for advancement, then it goes without saying that this nation embarks on borrowing from other nations, on seeking a way out of its current situation and changing new ideas for old. Never has the Bulgarian nation found itself in such a feverish situation as it is in now… Great movements have their great vices too… This is why some of our aspirations acquire a painful character. In order to learn, we have to imitate…” But how are we to know, when choosing what to imitate, which is good and which is bad? Karavelov’s answer was somewhat elusive but consistent with his general outlook: by means of science and its critical implementation. “Each imitation and innovation, fashions included, is good for the nation’s life”; it was however to the critics to “leave only what brings in positive and unequivocal benefit.” Anyway, “each nation starts out first by adopting what is shining from the outside and only after it transforms its brains as well. Each society should go through the fashion disease…” 74 71

Zastava, IV, 31, 7 March 1869. Lyuben Karavelov, Sabrani sachineniya, VI, Sofia, 1985, 77. 73 “Kiril and Metodii, balgarski prosvetiteli” [Cyrill and Methodius, Bulgarian Enlighteners]. Bucuresht, 1875, p. 1. 74 “Krivorazbranata civilizatsija” [The phoney civilization], Svoboda, II, 20, 1871. 72

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To recapitulate, the two camps in the Bulgarian national movement drew inspiration and arguments from the same pool of political-intellectual traditions. The outcomes in terms of “identity politics,” however, showed important differences. Differing and often warring political agendas had much to do with that: clearly, it was one thing to promote the material and moral strengthening of the Bulgarian ethnic component within the political framework of the Ottoman Empire and quite another to preach national revolt in the name of nation-state emancipation at any cost. However, the similarities were no less significant. They become even more so when keeping in mind the Serbian liberal case. Most noteworthy perhaps, the point where Bulgarian and Serbian liberals of all brands converged in opinion was the, what might be called, techniques of nation-building. In a strain of reasoning similar to that of Jevrem Griji∆, Slaveykov repeatedly evoked the pressing need for “general popular education, that is one which is spread among all ranks of the population…, in a word, to each member of the nation.” 75 The demonstration effect of schooling on nation-building, moreover, could hardly be exaggerated: as Slaveykov put it, “the [Prussian] victory at Sadova was not won by the Prussian needle-guns but by the Prussian primary schools, not the Prussian soldiers but the Prussian students.” 76 Karavelov’s pragmatic attitude to education, on the other hand, was not inconsistent with his conviction that the primary purpose of schooling was “to bring up humans and citizens,” “honest citizens and genuine patriots.” 77 However, the key instrument of forging the national collectivity and mobilizing its ability to act on behalf of that collectivity was (the concept of) political equality and participation. Both Slaveykov and Karavelov shared the Serbian liberals’ belief in the interrelatedness of internal and external freedom. In Karavelov it was articulated in almost identical language: if the states of Belgium or Switzerland were progressing (unlike the France of Napoleon III, by the way), this was due to their being “constituted on truly constitutionalist and liberal bases”; despite their smallness they were “prospering because each citizen is ready to defend his rights with his own blood, … because there one lives for all and all live for one.” 78 Yet, with Karavelov the philosophy of political liberalism had crystallized into a more utilitarian and less romantic vision of national democracy, consistent with his actual examples. Having 75

Petko R. Slaveykov, “Za obrazovanieto na naroda” [On the Nation’s Education], Makedoniya, II, 14, 2 March 1868. 76 “Osnovnite uchilishta i darzhavite” [The Primary Schools and the States], Makedoniya, IV, 79, 8 Sept. 1870. 77 Svoboda, III, 2, 8 July 1872; Nezavisimost, IV, 41, 27 July 1874. 78 Libertatea, 3, 20 Jan. 1871.

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chosen the United States and Switzerland as standard-bearers of the liberal polity, and being unconstrained by the political reality of a monarchic state, Karavelov was able to champion republican and democratic ideals far more openly than his Serbian peers realistically could. If in the New World a strong nation could be forged out of tens of religions and nationalities, “this ensues from the fact that the people itself is its own tutor and itself creates its own laws, conforming to its own desires and expressing its own will.” 79 This was what ultimately motivated the democratic procedure for the election of the head of the Bulgarian Church and the bishops as well. In a situation where state institutions, particularly nation-wide state sponsored schooling, were missing, the “national institution” of the church was entrusted with the mission of bringing up patriots and of training democrats. It was at the same time conveniently attuned to the liberals’ favored dictum that “a single person could always err, but a whole people rarely so.” The influence of the clergy among its flock, Karavelov argued, was proportionate to its ability to accelerate the nation’s advancement, that is, to act as a “patriotic clergy” like the American priesthood did. Slaveykov fully backed this approach to the clerical issue and the Statutes of the Church. There were no nobles among the Bulgarians, he stated, and the time of nobilities was anyway gone in the nineteenth century. “Today the strong torrent of democratic ideas is flooding all over… and commands equality: equality in science, equality in well-being and in human dignity.” It followed that the “whole Bulgarian nation” should “be trained to exercise its proper rights” by allowing it to choose its shepherds.80 That was just an extreme instance of driving a familiar message home: fast national progress and personal well-being were possible where “those who govern and those governed are equal between themselves and in front of the law.” 81 The risk of mistakes, experiments and crises incurred by “granting the free will of the people to vote as it pleases,” Slaveykov poured oil on potentially troubled waters, shouldn’t scare, for a nation, just like an individual, was learning and moving ahead by means of the “mundane school” of the mistakes, experiences and hardships it was going through.82 Mutatis mutandis, liberal reformists and revolutionaries in both Serbia and Bulgaria were at one in their credo that liberal politics, in fact the viability of the political liberal project, in their societies was inextricably linked with the practical exercise of popular democracy.

79

Svoboda, I, 45, 7 Oct. 1870. Makedoniya, V, 1871, 1. 81 Idem; II, 2, 11 Jan. 1871. 82 Makedoniya, III, 19, 5 Apr. 1869. 80

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The latter’s egalitarian underpinnings, given the centrality of the notion of popular sovereignty, were to prove as strong in the Bulgarian as they were in the Serbian liberal tradition. In Bulgaria this was perhaps most plainly exposed during the debates attending the establishment of the new state in 1878. It was first and foremost this basic characteristic that explains why, once the dividing issue of dualism versus secession was forcibly solved by a Russo-Ottoman war, the formerly moderate P. R. Slaveykov found himself at the head of the united left-liberal camp in the Constitutive Assembly next to Lynben Karavelov’s brother and future leader of the Liberal party, Petko Karavelov. Both had had by then occasions to denounce a major “canker of [Bulgarian] public and national life”—the division between educated and uneducated, villagers and townsmen—which was threatening “the sense of uniformity, brotherhood and love,” a sense that “has brought together and sustained the entirety of the nation.” 83 But it was during and in the aftermath of the debates in the Constitutive Assembly that this “sense of uniformity” took the form of an emphatically political language and embodied into actual institutions. The Bulgarians had no legacy of monarchic regime or privileged estates, Slaveykov argued in a lengthy speech against the establishment of a second chamber as proposed by a small group of more moderate liberals (dubbed accordingly “conservatives”). Therefore, they had no need of a Senate or State Council. The contentions that followed may well be seen as characteristic of the underlying philosophy of that populist version of liberal nationalism that was to prevail amongst the Bulgarian liberals after the establishment of the state. For the Bulgarians to achieve “a strong and sound government,” Slaveykov continued, there should be no barriers between it and the governed: “the people should be in direct relations to the government.” All conventional arguments of contemporary constitutionalism in favor of a second chamber were one by one disqualified by virtue of one basic charge that Slaveykov himself summarized: “It is insulting for a whole nation to accept the biased judgment of its complete inability and so to say incompetence to deal with the national affairs and to admit as able and competent just a few privileged persons… One of the commonest delusions of mankind is that everyone should think of oneself as being smarter and better than the others and that the others… need his smartness and leadership… Individual leaders, however smart and enlightened they may be, are much more liable to get things wrong than the maturely heeded collective or popular opinion.” 84 Not exactly liberal, but clearly democratic. 83 84

“Obshtestveniya nash zhivot” [Our Public Life], Makedoniya, V, 1871, 39. Protokolite na Uchreditelnoto Narodno Sabranie v Tîrnovo [The Minutes of the Constituent Bulgarian National Assembly in Tîrnovo], Plovdiv etc., 1879, pp. 265–266.

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Egalitarian democracy was the political tool by which the Bulgarian liberals sought to appropriate the underlying source of modern legitimacy—the people. The Tîrnovo constitution that was to remain in force until after the Second World War contained a number of “ultra-liberal” provisions, including universal male suffrage, a single chamber, prohibition of titles and slavery of any kind, extensive civil liberties, and ministerial liability. Owing to its relatively late emergence, the Bulgarian state did not pass through a restrictive oligarchic phase and stepped directly into the liberal-nationalist one that characterized the other Balkan states after the 1860s. But the enforcement of its political modernity followed the same “popular-democratic,” populist route, and egalitarian democracy was to become constitutive of the modern Bulgarian political identity. The revolution in the conception of legitimate rule described so far is integral to modern nationalism. It constitutes a fundamental principle of modern government. Central to it in the Serbian and the Bulgarian contexts, however, were not the liberal precepts of enlightened rule, but the traditional notion of popular self-government. Characteristic of that notion was the egalitarian rendition of democracy as derived from the monolithic popular designation of the community that was endowed with the right of self-rule and from the understanding of liberty as “popular freedom” and “freedom of the national whole.” The foundation of the modern Serbian and Bulgarian states was thus made to rest on the congenital liberal nationalism and constitutional democratism of the Serbian or the Bulgarian peasant, on the pillars of his communalist, selfruling aptitudes. But having been confident in their assignment to promote the genuine, properly understood national interests, the liberals showed little inclination to abide by the opinions of this “peasant nation” or to explain to it the meaning of belonging to it. Their understanding of sovereignty was not one of practical politics but one about an abstract nation and a nameless people, whose self-conscious and creative epitome were the educated and the enlightened. Hence, once faced with the exigencies of practical government, it was not difficult for them to surrender the ideal of a democracy based on a nation of backward peasantry. Instead, and in indicative harmony with their far more discriminatory Romanian peers, they undertook to reform their societies from patriarchal into modern by forging a new—civic—national identity and by modernizing not the rural but the urban sector of their economies. But the political cost was high: by around the late-1880s, the Liberal parties in both Serbia and Bulgaria had ended up at the mercy of the royal courts, totally lacking in popular support, and their victories at the polls were invariably secured by manipulation and coercion. Their opponents could not fail to grasp the opportunities thus created. Significantly, they came from the left—from the radical or the agrarian circles—and their success rested with a radical re-definition. The bearer of national sovereignty

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ceased to be the abstract national will and the vanguard elite translating that will into progressive transformations. The bearer of national sovereignty became the communitarian and almost physical whole of the wretched peasantry. Far from being demolished, the erstwhile liberal framework was brought to its logical completion.

V. The story of liberal nationalism in Wallachia and Moldova, in comparison to the other two countries, is the longest and, in terms of access to governmental power, perhaps the most triumphant. Not only did some Enlightenment liberal themes appear there relatively early but, more importantly, following the unification of the principalities in the late 1850s, the Romanian liberals succeeded in establishing themselves as the dominant force in the new nation-state, in command of all institutional levers to enforce their version of liberalism. That was a situation significantly different from the one in Serbia, with the short-lived liberalism-in-power there, and even from that of the largely mono-liberal political landscape in Bulgaria, which was, however, dominated after 1879 by foreign crises and a strongly fragmented party configuration. To be sure, the distinctions marking the nature and the course of Romanian liberalism counted more than that. The continuous estate structure, autonomous administration under Ottoman suzerainty and common traditional-aristocratic nexus of the modern Romanian elite— all these features, as noted earlier, set the sociological parameters of these differences. But there were cultural ones as well: whether by force of the Latinist theory of the Romanian origin of the Transylvanian school or the overriding mentorship of Romantics of the cast of Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, French romantic nationalism and the sway of Western as distinct from the Central European liberalism were far more formative of the Romanian than of the Serbian or the Bulgarian versions. The definition of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanian liberalism as a gentry or nobility liberalism engenders typological problems similar to those identified with respect to the contemporary Polish situation.85 It is not difficult to see why the bulk of Romanian national historiography should choose to interpret the opposition of the big nobility against the absolutist rule of the Phanariot princes as the original “national program” or “progressive nationalism” of the Romanian boyars.86 But teleological reading aside, there is little reason 85 86

See Maciej Janowski’s contribution to this volume. From the more recent interpretations along these lines, see, for example, Gh. Platon, 1993, pp. 21–22, 24–25, 29–31 ff; Fl. Constantiniu, 1985, p. 17; K. Hitchins, pp. 54–57.

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to take the boyars’ self-legitimating patriotic rhetoric at face value. Their claims might have well sought to assert the nobility as the single authentic bearer of the Romanian state tradition and “national” sovereignty (in the implicit sense of “the nation of boyars”). However, the political program behind it was moved by strictly estate—not ethnically based or national-political—demands, if the latter are understood (as they should be) in terms of the right of the people to self-rule and the congruence of ethnic (cultural) and political boundaries. In this respect there is an interdependence between estate liberties and state rights; hence it is not always easy to distinguish between claims to re-instatement of traditional social status and modern projects for the creation of a “Romanian state.” Suffice it to note that it was precisely the question about who belonged to the Romanian nation, therefore, who could legitimately represent it, which fueled the battles between big and small nobility, in order to realize that there is no straightforward answer. The state of political thought at the turn of the eighteenth century probably best illustrates the correlation between Enlightenment intellectual stirrings and the practical limitations of an envisaged political reformism. The Romanian gentry’s critical reflection on the state of society and institutions in the two principalities—Phanariot administration, Ottoman suzerainty, and economic parasitism of the big nobility—was clearly vested into the sophisticated precepts of the Western Enlightenment. This critical analysis, however, was a far way off from any solutions in the vein of radical (and fashionable) French social and political thought. From the “menu” of Enlightenment ideas, the Romanian illuminati picked up the philosophy of the social contract, personal rights and the calls for education, rationality and order. The specific political formulae varied—from enlightened absolutism to a boyar state to an aristocratic republic—but all of them invariably implied an equation between boyar estate and legitimate polity. Delving into the DacoRoman origins of the Romanians and into historical precedents supplied the boyar opposition with respectable arguments, but until as late as the 1830s these did not translate into a political program for unification of the two principalities on the basis of their common ethnie. Meanwhile, the strongest single catalyst triggering the political potential of this cultural nationalism was the uprising in 1821, which marked the return to power of the boyars and the beginning of their historic split. The “national revolution” of 1821, as this anti-Ottoman rising is usually dubbed, deserves its reputation by virtue of its results not its ideology. In its aftermath, the political power in the two Danubian principalities passed irreversibly into the hands of the ethnically Romanian political class. Within the general historical context of the early nineteenth century, this “re-instatement of ancient rights”—the long-time quest of the big nobility—would furnish the institutional framework for

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the gradual creation of the modern Romanian nation-state. As for the power ambitions of the disadvantaged small nobility, they were yet lacking in proper ideology. The 1821 revolution, still far from signaling the emergence of a liberal strain inside the boyar estate, “underwent a transformation from a social into a national revolution and thus became a starting point of an ethnic revival without other social consequences.” 87 Its purpose and its success, as noted by one of the leaders of the 1848 movement, Nicolae B¥lcescu, was the defeat of Phanariotism and the “raising of Romanianism to power.” 88 The battles between prince and oligarchy characteristic of the first years of the Serbian state, as indeed their outcome, had a close analogue in the Danubian principalities in the two decades following the uprising. Only that in the Romanian case it was not a bureaucratic but an aristocratic oligarchy. The latter’s constitutional projects were essentially aimed to provide legal security for their historical estate rights, political as well as economic. True, the lesser boyars continued to invigorate the political debate with enlightened reformist demands. The socalled “Carbonari constitution” (Constitutia carvunarilor) of 1822—perhaps the best example of the gentry’s political credo of the time— pleaded for constitutional rule, separation of legislative and executive power, equality before the law, basic civil rights. However, all these modern liberal ideas remained embedded in the fundamental code of estate privileges, of equality within the boyar ranks. The existence of other classes in Romanian society was not even mentioned. There was still a way to go before the ‘Westernized’ nobility would attempt to vest its knowledge of modern political precepts into likewise modern social programs and economic theory.89 Until that happened—in programmatic terms during the 1840s and in practical politics after the late 1850s—the royal heads and noble assemblies in the two principalities would keep drawing upon the moderate reformist tradition of the previous decades whose institutional models were enlightened and whose values were patriarchal and aristocratic. A serious challenge to the regime from the position of a radical political action was gradually beginning to take shape in the course of the 1840s. Its champions, calling themselves “liberals,” emerged from a new generation of mostly lesser boyars and former state functionaries having recently acquired a boyar rank, as well as sons of the traditional ruling elite. The European, above all, French education would supply 87

Lovinescu, 1972, p. 92. B¥lcescu, 1967, p. 279. 89 As Vlad Georgescu had pointed out (1987, p. 101), “the boyars showed a certain interest in the development of the cities, but not of the citizens whom they often succeeded to disregard completely.” 88

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this young boyar generation—at least the far-sighted among them and those sensitive to the threat of dropping out of power—with the ideological instruments of modern politics and modern legitimization. The Romanian liberals and the Romanian “bourgeoisie” of the first half of the nineteenth century were thus represented primarily by “intellectualized” and “commercialized” nobility. The origins of Romanian conservatism and liberalism, between 1821 and 1858, had no distinctive class roots: they emerged from the ideological and political conflict within the boyar estate, where even the division between (privileged) big and (underprivileged) lesser echelons was an unreliable one in terms of the position assumed. The radical message which this cohort of boyar sons came to deliver contained two central themes: democracy and nationalism. The former implied abolition of estate privileges, equality before the law, and solving the peasant question; the latter, unification and independence of the two principalities, Wallachia and Moldova. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the two catchwords were underpinned by a new concept of the nation—one no more identical with the traditional elite, but signifying instead the totality of the “people”; and by a new notion of legitimate government—one that spoke on behalf and in the interest of all Romanians. Their staunch purveyors were gathered in the Society of the Romanian students in Paris—an impressive congregation of future statesmen, representing the whole spectrum of liberal opinions, from the most radical to the most moderately reformist. The hour of this bunch of well-educated idealists struck in the spring of 1848. For the Romanians, the genuine revolution—“democratic and social” as Nicolae B¥lcescu called it—took place in Wallachia. “The ideas and interests of the people had changed and the long-waited revolution could not limit itself to the platform of 1821. Now it was not enough to only want the state to become Romanian, for the issue of the people’s poverty also had to be solved, property, the basis of society, of public wealth and happiness had to be given a new organization. Crushing the regulation that monopolized the state, the ownership of land and capital in the hands of the ciocoi, were all absolutely necessary to proclaim the democracy of the state by equality of rights, of the land, by giving it to the peasants, and of capital by the loaning institutions organized by the state. Hence the need to accomplish a democratic and social revolution. Such was the program of the 1848 revolution,” wrote B¥lcescu two years after the upheaval.90 Its pursuits were laid down in the Manifesto of Isla, the revolutionary “constitution” which marked the highest point of the national-democratic ideology of the Romanian paºoptistii, or 1848-

90

B¥lcescu, 1967.

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generation. “The Romanian people is waking up… to declare its sovereign right,” trumpeted the opening of this proclamation, followed further by a remarkable list of liberal demands and intentions. The only issues which caused dissension in the liberal camp and were left practically unsolved were the land question and that of political enfranchisement— the same that were to fuel the parliamentary battles between conservatives and liberals until as late as the First World War. The lesson drawn from the crush of the revolution by conservative reformists and radical liberals alike was that, however the modernization of the country was to be understood, it was found to be unfeasible in a “supranational” framework, in a situation of administrative division of the two principalities and foreign sovereignty. “Internal freedom is unattainable without external freedom,” concluded B¥lcescu in his above-quoted treatise devoted to the role of revolution in the formation of the Romanian national spirit. The dialectics between inner and outer freedom, characteristic of the Serbian and the Bulgarian liberalisms, in post-1848 Wallachia and Moldova was clearly pushed in the direction of “national unity and nationality.” B¥lcescu was at pains to prove the existence of a, what he called, “revolutionary synthesis” in the Romanian evolution as a singular bridge between its “universality” and “particularity.” To this effect, he dubbed the 1821 uprising, quite exaggeratedly, a “democratic revolution” in that it “wanted that all Romanians be free and equal, that the state be Romanian.” The 1848 revolution that followed it, “wanted that the Romanian be not only free, but also proprietor, without which liberty and equality are lies. To this end, it added the word brotherhood, this major condition for social progress. It was a social revolution.” But the last in sequence of these revolutions was in fact transformed into a condition for the success of the former two. “The next revolution cannot be confined to asking that the Romanians be free, equal, owners of land and capital, and brothers associated to achieve the jointly desired progress. It will not possibly be limited to asking liberty from within, which is impossible to achieve without having freedom from outside, freedom from foreign domination, but it will ask for national unity and liberty. Its slogan will be: justice, brotherhood, unity. It will be a national revolution.” The pre-eminence of this “final” revolution ensued from the definition of the subject of freedom: “If nationality is the soul of a people, if as long as it preserves this distinguishing sign of its individuality, this spirit of life, it is invested with the unalienable right to live in freedom, national unity is the guarantee of its liberty, it is its necessary body so that the soul does not disappear and it does not become numb, but on the contrary it can grow and develop. National unity has been the dear dream of our brave leaders, of all our great men who embodied the individuality and thinking of the people

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to show it to the world.” 91 This is exactly what Svetozar Mileti∆ was to call shortly after, as we may remember, the punctum saliens of the national “higher organism”: the copulation of the metaphysical “soul of a people” with the “body of national unity”—just the other term for freedom, in fact—out of which the “creative spiritual force” of the nation, in Mileti∆’s words, could be unleashed. The similar mixture of “romantic” and “civic” nationalist themes is ever more remarkable given that B¥lcescu and Mileti∆ did not belong to the same intellectual or revolutionary circle, while their sources of inspiration were respectively French and German; the one common element they always had was their activist connection with the Italian irredentist movement. The decade between 1848 and 1859, fairly in tune with B¥lcescu’s anatomy of the Romanian revolution, was marked by the feverish propaganda of the so-called “national party,” led by the liberal exiles in Paris but representing a broad elite spectrum, in favor of the unification of the Romanian principalities in a single nation-state. Romanian liberalism in this phase, as other such movements in the neighboring empires, had a largely subversive and revolutionary character and overlapped with the struggle for national emancipation and unification. The diplomatic rearrangement following the Crimean War made possible the peaceful unification of the two Principalities between 1859 and 1863. By means of etatist measures and a firm-hand rule, rather than liberal niceties, Alexandru Cuza, the prince-unifier, and Mihail Kog¥lniceanu, his prime minister and former paºoptist, succeeded in introducing a number of drastic reforms in the legislature, land regime, education and administration, which set the frame of the modern nation-state. The history of Romanian liberalism-in-power, indeed of the modern Romania state, could now begin in actu. Unlike in Serbia or in Bulgaria, liberalism in Romania had the historical chance to go beyond, what Lovinescu called, the “phase of the ideological revolution” and step into that of the “economic revolution.” 92 While sharing the basic tenets of contemporary liberalism with their fellows to the south of the Danube, Romanian liberals differed from them in both institutional achievement and modernizing zeal. Within a very short period of time, and most pronouncedly during the decade between 1860 and 1870, the nascent Romanian state adopted almost the whole package of European institutions and legislation. Likewise, the Romanian liberals espoused a more normatively “liberal” version of democracy than their (peasant-based) Serbian or Bulgarian compeers in that their ideal was not the self-rule of a nation of backward peasantry, but repre-

91 92

Idem. Lovinescu, 1972, p. 478.

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sentative government of the best educated and socially reliable. Their avowed goal was modernization of the urban, not the rural, sector of the economy through forced industrialization under state protection and encouragement for the urban middle class. All this related to a more narrowly bourgeois liberal viewpoint, a version of liberalism-inpower, sometimes called “sectarian,” which prevailed in Europe during the 1860s-1870s and whose “central stress was upon economic liberty, upon the paramount importance of encouraging individual initiative and private enterprise.” 93 It was this late European type that inspired the politics of the National Liberal party of Romania after the mid1860s. The briefly ruling “Progressivist liberalism” in Serbia and some smaller Liberal parties in Bulgaria shared some of the elitist political prescriptions with this body of doctrine but not its central feature: the accent on the urban economy and its driving force—the “national” middle class—from which ensued many of the distinctive messages of Romanian liberalism. These typological differences notwithstanding, the Romanian liberals were as eager to identify the fundamental liberal principles—seen to fit their constructivist goals—not in the Western canon of ideas, from where they were actually taken, but in the traditions and values of the national past. For, as the leading Moldavian liberal, Michail Kag¥lniceanu, pointed out, “the real civilization is the one that derives from our bosom, by way of reforming and improving the institutions of the past with the ideas and successes of the present.” 94 The two referential epochs where Romanian liberals located, in their search for the identity-building “heritage” of the Romanian nation, the untainted national “kernel” were the Daco-Roman Antiquity and the Romanian “middle Ages” broadly situated between the fourteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. There appeared to be no clash between the legacy of either of these eras (whose co-existence, in terms of modern identity politics, was commonly taken as problematic) and the prerequisites of modernity. On the contrary, even pragmatic politicians, such as the liberal leader Ion C. Br¥tianu, saw themselves compelled to frequently and passionately refer to a certain primordial, discontinuous model shaped by the Romanian past and excavate therefrom the modern elements of the liberal doctrine. Thus the Romans who had settled in ancient Dacia, according to I. C. Br¥tianu, had kept the republican spirit alive. That spirit came not from Rome, where the flame of liberty had been extinguished by that time, but from the rural environment which had preserved the old faith

93 94

Brown, 1982, p. 277. Cf. Carlton J. Hayes, 1963, p. 49. Cit. in Eugen Lovinescu, 1972, p. 122.

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and virtues. Roman settlers in those lands were a sort of political emigrant, refugees fleeing because of their convictions—a fact that made the foundation of the Romanian nation comparable to that of the American nation, as both shared in the religion of liberty. Much like the emigrant English Puritans, “the democratic and freedom-loving population of Italy, in order to free itself from the fiscal yoke, from the abuses of the privileged, and from the threats that it would lose its land, took up a plough in one hand and a sword in the other and set on to raise the pillar of liberty in a new land, young and strong, away from the stinking air of despotism.” It was in the midst of these new Roman colonies that “democratic traditions were kept up sacred and pure.” The Romanian nation, thus, “not only has its mind and spirit ready for democracy, it has continuously carried [democracy] in its heart and customs.” 95 As to the representative institutions, it should be remembered that “Romania has its own past, and whilst other states had been under the sway of despotism, here we had a regime … [which was] all too liberal and, one may say, parliamentary.” The law on local government, too, was advertised as a revival of an ancient Roman tradition—“one of our ancient institutions”—that had been “salvaging” Romanians for centuries until “foreign rulers came and destroyed it.” 96 Here was a line of arguing that could have fit perfectly into some of Vladimir Jovanovi∆’s treatises on the organic democratism of the Serbs. Once more, the “proto-liberal” attributes of the Romanian historical being, much like those which the Serbian liberals identified in Serbia’s past, were primarily meant to legitimate a modern concept of the state by way of tradition and ancient custom. But they were also intended to imbue the nation, despite its miserable material condition, with a sense of belonging to the world it actually aspired to: a peculiar endeavour at endogenizing the exogenous in an act of, to use Sorin Antohi’s trope, “Romania’s geocultural bovarism.” 97 Indeed, the very backwardness of the Romanians was but the consequence of their centuries-long mission of a “vanguard of Christianity and a barrier against Asian invasions.” To this life-saving mission was added another—that of a bulwark of democratic Europe. “For nearly eighteen centuries,” wrote D. Br¥tianu in 1851, “we have been suffering, labouring and fighting in silence, without forgetting for a moment that we are entitled to represent in Eastern Europe the idea of individual freedom and collective progress, which make us Europeans and real forebears of humanism, that we are the vanguard of the Graeco-Latin race…Never, not even in our most inaus-

95

Ion C. Br¥tianu, 1938, vol. I., pp. 21–22. Idem, vol. VIII, p. 178; vol. IV, p. 31. 97 Antohi, 2002. 96

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picious days, have we been shaken in our vocation to humanity.” 98 So, from being disciples of the West the Romanians converted into its defenders and, in the final analysis, its forebears. Once the guardians of Christian Europe, now they stood as the guardians of democratic Europe, progenitors of European civilization in the East, a European model for the other Balkan nations that had set out on the road to their revival. Akin in pathos and destination was the claim about the unitary, supra-class nation, about the “national unity” as “popular feeling.” Its source, again, was the reality of an authentic democratic Romanian tradition. N. B¥lcescu described Romanian medieval society as built upon democratic and egalitarian principles, hence his induction that the Romanian nation rested upon the ancient triad of boyars, peasants and soldiers, each of which was endowed with the right to property and to carry arms.99 The Romanian boyars, far from oppressing the peasantry, “are those who…had built our kingdom on institutions so humane and egalitarian, that not even the laws of Licurgus or Solon could favorably compare to them.” Romanian aristocracy, moreover, “is not hereditary but open to all sons of our fatherland.” Indeed, it had judiciously presaged and accommodated the democratism of the French revolution.100 The liberal solution, therefore, the one that was closer than any other to the Western model, was presented in Romania, as in contemporary Serbia or Bulgaria, as re-actualisation of a normative past which ended with the late Middle Age and the subjection of the “nation” to a (corrupting) foreign rule. The rehabilitating and mobilizing implications of this romantic exaltation seem obvious and, in the intellectual and political context of contemporary Europe, hardly original.101 Yet again, the Romanian liberals’ inflated invention and redefinition of the “national” traditions and collective moral kernel did not serve to celebrate an indigenous project. Or, to refer in a somewhat inverted sense to Sorin Antohi’s rigorous taxonomy of Romanian symbolic (self)reference,102 it did not culminate in the sublimation of the local. It was rather meant to 98

Georgescu, 1987, pp. 79–80. Cf. Lucian Boia, 1997, pp. 30–32, 36–37. Critical historians such as M. Kogaalniceanu were no more immune from the temptation to look for a privileged position of Romania in European history (see Boia, 1997). 99 B¥lcescu, 1988, p. 14. 100 ‘The old boyars were not scared by the French republic…because they turned their domestic servants into new boyars to whom they gave their daughters and nieces as wives,’ R¥dulescu, 1916, p. 85, 133. 101 Looking back to this period of his political career, Vladimir Jovanovi∆ admitted: “If we wanted to become part of the great national movement, which then pervaded Europe, we had to awaken our people—a dormant people had nothing to hope for.” (Sl. Jovanovi∆, 1961, p. 32). 102 Antohi, 2002.

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obliterate the local as such by either denying it whatever uniqueness (dreaded or sublimated) or, conversely, postulating some “folkloric essence” whereby the normatively Western was found to reside into most unexpected places—in a sort of politically correct Volkgeist. Romanian history of the previous few centuries had been but an aberration, a historical accident, whose elimination was to bring their country to where it naturally belonged. The liberals, as a student of Romanian political thought pointed out, upheld a sort of “kin” or genetic concept of the Romanian community, according to which it had preserved intact its original “instincts” forged at the time of its formation, when, due to the Romans, it had been an integral part of European civilization. It was those original features that constituted the community’s traditional essence, on the basis of which the democratic institution of “medieval Romania” could be built, and it was their enduring power that made the adoption of such institutions not just feasible but effective. For there was a case not of borrowing but of reunion of two similar structures which shared the same origin. This tradition, located not in an unspecified premodern age (to which the conservatives abstractly referred), but in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was not a victim of modernization, but rather its starting point and fertile base. What the liberals meant by tradition had nothing to do with the experience bequeathed by the centuries of political decline; they meant the Romanians’ original ethnic essence and the prerequisite for the democratic institutions posited somewhere between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.103

VI. The difference in the elements identified as inherently conductive to the liberal project in our three countries, highlights their distinct sociocultural contexts. The Serbian liberals, with their adulation of the virtues of the patriarchal and communitarian norms of the village, offered an expressly popular rendition of the nature of Serbian history and the “public Serbian spirit.” The Romanian liberals, however, produced a sort of “Whig” interpretation of the Romanian specificul naµional whose key elements, besides the invariable missionary predilection, were the respect of individual and national freedom, existing property rights and national unity, and commitment to the progressive principles of the civilized world. The (application of) notions of property, as the embodiment of the fundamental public ethos, in the two contexts provide the most illuminating case. If the Romanians had been spared subjugation

103

Georgescu, 1987, p. 84–5.

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and displacement by Asiatic invasions and had withstood the migrations, it was primarily by virtue of their attachment to and identification with their property. The Slavs, by contrast, having known only “collective property,” were doomed to be “in incessant movement” and easily subdued, a fact that explained their settlement among the Romanians.104 Remarkably, it was precisely this property distinction between the Slavs and all the rest—but endowed with a strongly positive sign— through which the Serbian liberals, and especially the Serbian radicals, upheld the peculiar propensity of their folk for modern development. In this respect, again, the outlook of the Romanian liberals, and the corresponding definition of the “national specificity” which it entailed, resembled much more that of the Serbian Progressivists than the one of the nominal Serbian fellows. In either case, however, the quasi-populism of the official liberal doctrines and praxis was evident. Liberals everywhere in the Balkans, while destroying traditional rural cultures through their modernity-constructing reforms, sought to carve out “formative national pasts” from the premodern symbolic world of the “national” peasantries. Their aim was not to devise a popular ontology per se but to establish a non-problematic connection between deep-seated forms of life and the structures of social and political modernity. Historical self-knowledge could serve a similar function as was demonstrated by the arch-modernizer Mihail Kog¥lniceanu when explicating the connection between national history and modern national-identity construction: “… only bankrupt nations mention their ancestors permanently, like the fallen Evangelists. Even if we descend from Hercules, if we are rogues, the world will know us as such; on the contrary, if we get rid of demoralization and civic separation, which drive us to peril, we shall approach with more determined steps the path of brotherhood, of patriotism, of a sound, not superficial, civilization, as we have it, and then Europe will respect us, even if we descend from the hordes of Genghis Khan. Therefore, gentlemen, I will not hide from you that laws, customs, language and our beginnings stretch back to the Romans; history asserts these truths with firmness; but let me tell you once again that I am far from flattering a ridiculous mania by talking to you about the Romans’ deeds as if they were ours; I am going to do something more useful, though; if you really want to be known as true sons of the Romans, I will force myself to urge you to do what resembles the deeds of the world ruling people.” 105 The bulk of

104

Ion C. Br¥tianu extensively developed this thesis in a speech during his 1883 election campaign (see A. Stan, 1993, pp. 390–391.) 105 Mihail Kog¥lniceanu, “Cuvînt de deschidere la academia Mih¥ilean¥” (1843) in: Mihail Kog¥lniceanu, 1967, p. 174.

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Bulgarian liberals, with Slaveykov and Karavelov at their head, would have fully concurred with this detached and pragmatic attitude to history as they would have had with the search for “sound, not superficial, civilization” by way of “deeds” rather than “ancestors.” The Romanian liberals’ foregoing references to history and tradition, then, are important for our purposes only to the extent that they can help us understand better some of their politico-philosophical premises—especially regarding the background of the strange theoretical paucity of their state-building heritage. The significance of this philosophy, in view of the long liberal governance from the mid-1870s onwards, ensues from their own understanding of the revolutionary role of ideas and of the institutions created to embody and promote these ideas. That, notably, signified a shift in their self-legitimization from claiming conformity with the existing—inappropriate—social reality towards creation of an appropriate one. The very selection of historical references and precedents, as we saw, was led by the intention to resurrect and rehabilitate an essentially modern Romanian context synchronic with the “European” one. The Romanian liberals’ entire ideology and politics proceeded from the conviction that any profound progressive change, above all, modernization in general, in “young nations” can unfold in one direction only: from the idea towards the reality, from form towards substance, from the elite towards the mass of the people. To the regret, spelled out in detail by the leading conservative politician, Petre P. Carp, that “democratization in this country takes place top down instead of bottom up,” one of the liberals’ chief figures, Constantin Rosetti, replied: “During my whole life I have been saying and shall say again that revolutions should take place top down, and not bottom up.” 106 The sweeping modernization of the political sphere, which had started with Prince Cuza’s reforms, followed a correspondingly crude yet lucid syllogism: first and foremost, perforce, must be the building of the modern state and institutional forms which, in their turn and through conscious policies, should work for the transformation of a backward, “anachronistic” Romanian society. All this was closely related to the liberal nationalists’ belief that the modernization of society in the noted mode was inextricably linked with the success of national unity and the acceleration of progress—ultimately, with the survival of the nation in an internationally aggressive (geo-)political and economic environment. In vain was thus the admonition of the (also West-informed) conservatives that “it is civilization that engenders liberty, not the other way round.” 107 Their rejection of the burgeoning forms without substance, as a result of the

106 107

Cit. in Lovinescu, 1972, p. 149. Carp, 1907, p. 202.

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reckless transplantation of Western ideas and institutions, was a foregone critique: the liberals were pretty much aware that the liberal constitution of 1866 was not “just making into law what has already become a fact,” as Titu Maiorescu, another gifted critic of Romania’s mimetic Westernization, had wanted it. Quite self-consciously, it was introduced largely as an instrument for producing “supportive facts”—a form creating its substance. Having once established, in 1875, their party around the dynamic and zealous group of the most radical among them, the liberals found themselves at the head of an organizational structure able to pursue and enforce their constructivist visions. At the core of their entire platform and governmental policies had always been the encouragement of the nascent Romanian middle class together with a program for urbanization and industrialization: “a fierce devotion to the interests of the modernizing, urban bourgeoisie and the cause of ‘Economic Man’.” 108 This is perhaps the single most significant difference between the Romanian and the Serbian, to a large extent also the Bulgarian liberalisms, from which ensued a number of other differences. The legitimating functions which the Serbian and the Bulgarian liberals attributed to the principle of popular sovereignty, the Romanian liberals consigned to their identification with the urban entrepreneurial class and modern industry. Remarkably enough, this identification was articulated already in the initial, subversive phase of the evolution of Romanian liberalism when it was still non-institutionalized and in search of broader support. In the revolutionary 1848, Ion Ghica, a prominent boyar and moderate liberal, for the first time declared the middle class to be the most progressive section in Romanian society, one that was rendering the greatest services to the nation, based upon which he asserted its political claims and need of further strengthening. Shortly after, Ion C. Br¥tianu pompously added that “civilized man is the product of exchange, of trade,” the result of which was to “turn the earth into a paradise, and man into an angel (sic).” 109 New in such statements were not only the mission of industry and the merchant class, new was also the ethos which these carried along, the utilitarian morality of “the material interest that increases the happiness of the nations” because “the engine of any human activity is the love for yourself.” The small minority, even in cities, of the ethnic-Romanian producers, the sought after Romanian bourgeoisie, was thus raised to a sole legitimate representative of the “sovereign people,” embodying its civilizing mission, the “new society” and “reborn Romania.” The bourgeoisie, in the words of Ion C. Br¥tianu, was not a “class but a new society through which the national consciousness, 108 109

Brown, 1982, p. 282. Br¥tianu, vol. I, 1938, p. 159.

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even the genius of Romania is expressed. […] It possess all qualities of energy and morality that characterize this class in each European society: but it possess not only the instinct and love for freedom, which is natural for any class with a democratic nature, but also a most elevated, most enthusiastic patriotism. It is above all in the midst of the merchant class that the germ of Romanian civilization resides, and with its extinction alone could civilization and civic liberties in Romania perish.” 110 The governmental policy of the liberals after their coming to power in 1876 was, in consequence, subordinated to the major objective of boosting up the demographic and economic weight of the specifically Romanian middle class through direct protection, a curtailing of the economic positions of foreigners and a long-term program of nationalization of industry and finance. Their nationalist fight with foreign entrepreneurship, in which they employed all the resources of the new state, was not waged over the question of how the Romanian economy should develop but who should develop it. In this fight the ethnic-Romanian bourgeoisie did not merely assert its key mission to the country and the nation; in this fight, the ethnic-Romanian bourgeoisie was creating itself. The emancipated urban “class” in the ideology of Romanian liberalism was, in other words, endowed with the meaning and cultural mission that the peasantry had for the Serbian and the Bulgarian liberal nationalists: it was an incarnation of the best qualities of the nation and a driving force of its progress, an indication and a warranty that Romania was inherently fit to be part of the civilized world. Apparently, there had been little hesitation as to the applicability of an exogenous model of development, of the Western notion of the vital role of the third estate in particular, and a blatant disregard for Romania’s overwhelming agrarian profile. Romanian liberalism, unlike the other Balkans versions at the time, sought political legitimacy not by claiming consistency with the “authentic” national structures, institutions and values—that is, with the existing social reality, but by attempting to create a completely new basis and, thus, justification of its existence—an ethnic-Romanian bourgeoisie and “national capitalism”—that is, by creating a completely new social reality. The Romanian liberals were, as a result, less concerned with accommodating liberalism to the rural identity of the Romanian nation than with the “transformation” of that nation in such a way so that it could foster Romania’s “civilizing role” in the East in conformance with their modern visions. It was this same utopia, however, that generated the most serious practical problem of Romanian liberalism. The liberals’ opponents from the conservative camp were the first to contest the

110

Cit. in Lovinescu, 1972, pp. 192–193. Cf. Vlad Georgescu, 1987, pp. 101–102.

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“validity” of the liberal project, particularly with respect to the new institutional arrangement of the state: since that project had no social foundation in the country, its power incarnation, the Liberal party, was nothing but a “budgetary party,” one that “exists mainly by virtue of politics and through politics.” 111 To the self-evident stakes of the conservatives the liberals could counterpoise only the efforts at warranting their existence by siding with a social class that was yet to be created. In this sense, the Romanian bourgeoisie was indeed a political creation with a political purpose par excellence. The liability had broader implications still. If the liberal project had any merits to the Romanians, those were not in the present but a promise for the future. In the present of even the late nineteenth century, the liberals had little to point to as their proper contribution to the improvement of the Romanians’ condition or to the more equitable distribution of power among them. What was instead visible was the moral confusion, the ruinous impact of their Westernizing drive upon the mass of the Romanians, “the national convulsions, the natural counter-reaction of the violated, tormented mentality.” 112 Apparently, that brand of social engineering was inaccessible to the other Balkan liberals, constrained as they were to operate within politically open, national-democratic systems—and, even so, they proved effectively challenged, in both Serbia and Bulgaria, by more authentic transcribers of the “national will.” That same constraint, on the other hand, and the overwhelming self-identification of Bulgarian and Serbian liberalisms with the vox populi, may go some way in explaining why the “anti-Westernism” of some of their spokesmen, such as the above-discussed P. R. Slaveykov, did not take the form of an alternative cultural-political program of the kind the Romanian opponents to the liberals, the so-called Junimists, came up with already before the end of the century. The Romanian liberals’ characteristic vision of the nation could become unraveled via their approach to the land (and peasant) question. For the 1848 generation that question was still the gravest one of all, “the great political and social problem of the principalities,” as Nicolae B¥lcescu called it: from its solution depended not just the principalities’ future “but the future of all Romanians as well.” B¥lcescu’s path-breaking analysis of the history of the land question, in addition to supplying the liberal reformers with historical arguments, postulated the connection between its solution and the continued existence of Romanianism and the Romanian nation, between the success of the social revolution and that of the national one.113 The same linkage had inspired the agrar111

C. Gane, 1936, p. 194. A. Popovici, 1910, p. 85. 113 B¥lcescu, 1982, pp. 151–162. 112

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ian reform of 1864 whose architect, Mihail Kog¥lniceanu, believed that “the question of land property, the peasant question…. [is] the very question of the Romanian nationality.” Liberal technocrats such as Petre Aurelian would add to this a series of arguments about the economic irrationality and low productivity of forced labor, the need of conformity between economic and social laws and of enlarging the domestic market through mass land distribution. The priorities of Romanian liberalism after the bloodless unification turned out to be different, however. “Let us leave aside the land issue,” Ion C. Br¥tianu counseled already during the initial debates on the agrarian reform, “let us first try to reconcile the enlightened spirits in the two parties [the liberal and the conservative]; to first create the needed institutions and, when it comes to the solving of the land issue, let us solve it in such a way as it will lead to the regeneration of Romania and put under no threat our national existence.” 114 So, national consolidation in the name of “national existence” and building of the state before considering the question of the land—these were the priorities of the most radical in the liberal camp. Indeed the agrarian issue was pretty much left aside until as late as 1907 when it dreadfully forced itself upon the whole Romanian political class in the form of the largest and most violent peasant rebellion in Europe in the twentieth century. Another key to an understanding of the central notion of “national consolidation” is the liberals’ attitude to political rights and participation. Predictably enough, the paºoptist (1848-er’s) rhetoric abounded with references to the sovereign nation (on behalf of which the liberals assumed to be speaking): “the Romanian people decides…, the Romanian people wants…, sovereign power stems from God and belongs to the whole country…, the Romanian state is the Romanian people…” But beyond the popular appeal of this revolutionary rhetoric, Constantin Rosetti was perhaps the only Romanian liberal who shared the declared faith of his Serbian and Bulgarian peers that “in its choice the majority of the people can never be wrong because the voice of the people is the voice of God,” and B¥lcescu and Kog¥lniceanu among the very few in whose concept of democracy there was a place for the Romanian village. In 1853 Br¥tianu was still arguing that “the notions of nationality, liberty and democracy are interrelated.” 115 But the actual pressure for broadening the franchise beyond the urban liberal stronghold was left, until the very eve of the Great War, to the powerless albeit noisy group of Romanian social democrats. At the backdrop of all this one will expect that the association of liberalism and nationalism, as characteristic of the Romanian case as it was 114 115

Cit. in E. Lovinescu, 1972, p. 194. Br¥tianu, vol. I, 1969, p. 471.

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of the Serbian and the Bulgarian, should render a rather dissimilar mixture and practical policies—despite the fact that the linkage between social transformation (contemporary and later-day adepts preferred the loftier “social revolution”), progressive development (or modernization) and nationalism (national unity and strong nation-state) was a generic one in all three cases. The elevation of the notion of nationality into a, what Ion C. Br¥tianu called, “sine qua non for the civilizing [of Eastern Europe],” a “natural and constitutive element of humankind…, and therefore absolutely necessary for its development,” 116 is barely original in this constellation. The scarcity of liberal tractates on Romanian nationalism and on the “content” of the Romanian nation before the War is astonishing. It is not matched, however, by a lack of evidence about the connection drawn between nationality and the national interest, as the primary raison d’être of the state, and the liberal institutions whose chief purpose was to serve them. Ion C. Duca would later confirm that the Liberal Party of Romania “embraces all forms of nationalism”—ideological, cultural and economic.117 On a practical level this was quite obvious—from around the 1880s onwards, the indications of the absorption of liberal norms into a system of “national priorities” were becoming increasingly visible. It was the fear that Romania would not survive international competition that led the Romanian liberals to that fundamental “betrayal” of the liberal doctrine—turning the newly established nation-state into an aggressive instrument of social and economic change. What ultimately mattered, in this and other instances, was national interest, not liberal theory with its classical precepts. Economic liberalism or laissez-faire, explained Ion C. Br¥tianu, was a dangerous precept for a country like Romania. It was invented in England at a time when English industry had already reached a phase where “it could defeat all other mercantile societies.” But if a country such as Romania adopted free exchange, it would be forever doomed to “remain enslaved by the industrial societies”; this was why it had to protect its national industry which was only now taking its first steps. The cleansing of the Romanian urban economy from foreigners proceeded from similar concerns, for, as Br¥tianu warned, a nation conquered by arms still kept its right to freedom, but if it was “conquered by economic means, it is destroyed for ever, legally as well as really”.118 The origin of Romanian anti-Semitism around the middle of the century lay in the same concoction of nationalism and economic

116

Idem, p. 472. Duca, 1924, pp. 103–105. 118 Br¥tianu, vol. I, pp. 249–250; vol. II, pp. 1, 159. 117

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analysis, and its defense was carried out with socio-economic rather than religious or racial arguments. The “foreigners,” above all, the Jews, became an issue due to the anxiety to secure the prevalence of “Romanianism” in the key sectors of the economy which the liberals considered crucial for their special project of modernization.119 Significantly, the various conflicting approaches to the burning agrarian issue were similarly legitimated in terms of their effect on national unity. The 1848 liberals saw the general land settlement as a powerful weapon for awakening the peasant’s national self-awareness and readiness to defend his fatherland—to them the question was not merely one of the relationship between landowners and peasants but one of a prime national interest. As Michail Kog¥lniceanu phrased it, “In order for our country to become civilized, we should have numerous proprietors, because only where there is love for the land, there is also love for the fatherland… The peasant question… is the very question of the Romanian nationality.” 120 Yet, again in the name of “national existence” and the “regeneration of Romania,” as we have seen, the liberals in the Romanian parliament rejected a radical solution of the land issue. At the same time, the small plots, which the former serfs received with the reform of 1864, were declared unalienable for a period of thirty years. But the rationale behind this anti-liberal attitude was different from the one behind similar measures in Serbia or Bulgaria: like the subsequent partial distributions of state lands, it sought to prevent extreme pauperization and, thus, the radicalization of the peasantry. This whole apparently controversial policy, therefore, proceeded from an immanently liberal ranking of social and political priorities, which helps us explain what one student of rural Romania defined as, “the intimate and obvious connection between the rise of the national state and the social decay of the peasantry.” 121 The question of political equality and participation was tackled from consistent positions. If all Romanian liberals agreed that in order for the people to be inspired by a “single goal… a single will: patriotism,” as Kog¥lniceanu put it, they should have equal access to the country’s wealth and rights; and if Br¥tianu claimed that “the flag of nationality, freedom and democracy is one”—this was not meant to imply that the actual promotion of equality or defense of the national-liberal flag could be entrusted to the nation itself. In tune with François Guizot, one of their early political mentors, they preferred to observe the narrowly lib-

119

Cf. Oldson, 1991, pp. 139–164. Cit. in A. Roman, 1999, pp. 56–57. 121 Mitrany, 1930, p. 568. 120

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eral maxim that “the gun and the vote [are] powerful weapons”: if used “unenlightenedly,” they can endanger the whole society.122 For Romanian liberal nationalism, the hour of radical political and social reform struck only with the uncertainties of the Balkan wars and the looming perils of a much larger European conflagration. But it came as recognition of sorts that it had failed in its own terms. The drama of Romanian liberalism was not so much in that the “prerequisites” for its success in nineteenth-century Romania were missing but that it never managed to achieve the sort of congruity between liberal cause and civic nationalism, or “external” and “internal” freedom, that liberals south of the Danube could forcefully claim to represent. Between these, in Romania, there was rather a chasm, as was made plain in 1907 and, in a rather altered political configuration, repeatedly afterwards. In terms of its own rationale, Romanian liberal nationalism faced a double failure: it had proved unable to substantiate its claim that the middle class was the nation, and it had also proved unable to reconcile the bulk of the Romanian nation with the “state idea”—with the belief that it was the liberal state that safeguarded best the well-being and the strength of the nation. Accordingly, it could not point to its identification with the “people’s interests”—with the legitimate expectations of the nation which it had itself created. The invention of an encompassing and enthralling vision of the Romanian nation failed to take place during the liberal nineteenth century. It was devised in the face of very different challenges that confronted Greater Romania after the First World War and those who advanced it came from among the enemies of the nineteenth-century liberal nationalists and their heirs.

VII. In the final analysis, the Balkan liberals’ lasting achievement proved not to be the mobilization of mass support despite their ideological and programmatic appeals to it or defense of (a modicum of) peasant property. The lasting achievement of the liberals’ intervention in the Balkan political scene was the creation of a modern political system and the installment of the nation-state as the only legitimate form of political power through the enactment of gradual political and social reforms and the cultivation of a national consciousness. Whereas before their ascendance, political legitimacy rested fully upon traditional grounds (e.g. ancient custom, monarchic rule, and higher education), after them politicians deemed it necessary to assert their right to power in terms of how truly they represented the people. The political class as a whole unani-

122

Kog¥lniceanu, 1959, pp. 28–45; Ion C. Br¥tianu, vol. II, 1, pp. 217–218.

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mously came to share one legitimating groundwork—the nation, and one ideal—national sovereignty. Distinctions were conceivable only on the common ground of nationalism understood first of all as a shared frustration on the backwardness of their societies and a fear that the latter could only be overcome at the cost of losing national identity. The battle henceforth was to be waged on the specific nature of this nation, of its sovereignty and the national interests, the fundamental similarities between the various modern political self-ascriptions being much more salient than their theoretical divergences. In Serbia and Bulgaria, though, it was the liberal left, and its subsequent radical, agrarian and socialist offshoots, that assumed a spectacular lead. By engrafting traditional communitarian leanings and values into the concept of popular self-rule in a language of strongly mobilizing rhetoric, it succeeded in establishing its domination over the idea of the nation and the political canon. From then on, anyone who thought they could represent the people better than the radical liberals, would have had to start from that high level. Above all, this association of nationalism in its civic aspect— the major heritage of liberal nationalism—and the doctrines of the left accounted for the latter’s long-standing ascendancy in the Balkans. It certainly goes a long way in explaining how national integration and peasant activation became possible before the Balkan countries had experienced a major socio-economic transformation. Although it would be too reductionist to solve the issue simply along these lines, it is worthwhile heeding the question to what extent the exceptionally strong support of the Romanian peasant for the inter-war radical right had to do with Romanian liberalism’s failure to achieve a similar synthesis between “popular” liberalism and civic nationalism. At the end of the day, however, the spokesmen of the liberally minded middle class everywhere in the Balkans were swept away by the spokesmen of the Balkan sovereign nations. And not by a historical accident but by the very logic of the political nation-state that the liberals themselves had created: once introduced by them as a key element of “inner” freedom, the representative system allowed for the emergence of political competitors who would broaden the definition of the nation. Subsequent to it was the political mobilization of the peasantry. The parties that carried it out—most notably, the Radicals in Serbia, the Agrarian National Union in Bulgaria, and, somewhat later, the National-Peasants in Romania—did this by considerably radicalizing the concept of the nation and popular sovereignty, which was originally introduced and monopolized by the liberals.

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Karavelov, Ljuben. 1985. Sabrani sîchineniya. VI, Sofia: Balgarski pisatel. Kog¥lniceanu, Mihail. 1959. Discursuri parlamentare din epoc¥ Unirii. Bucharest: Editur¥ ºtiinµific¥. ———. 1967. Scrieri literare, istorice, politice. Bucharest: Tinereµului. Kostis, Kostas. 2002. “The Formation of the State in Greece, 1830–1914,” in ed. Marco Dogo and Guido Franzinetti. Disrupting and Reshaping. Early Stages of Nation-Building in the Balkans. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Lovinescu, Eugen. 1972. Istoria civilizaµiei române moderne. I–III. Bucharest: Minerva. (Ist ed. 1925) Mileti∆, Svetozar. 1939. “Isto∑no pitanje“ [The Eastern Question], in ed. Miroslav Jerkov. Izabrani ∑lanci Svetozara Mileti∆a. Novi Sad: ≤tamparija Jovanovi∆ i Bogdanov. (First publ. in Srbski Dnevnik, 1863.) Mili∑evi∆, Jovan. 1970. ‘Prilog poznavanju porekla srbijanskog parlamentarizma,’ Zbornik filosofskog fakulteta, 9, 1. Mishkova, Diana. 2001. Prisposobiavane na svobodata: modernost v Srbiia i Ruminiia prez XIX vek. [Domestication of Freedom. Modernity-Legitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Serbia and Romania]. Sofia: Paradigma. Mitrany, David. 1930. The Land and the Peasant in Romania. The War and Agrarian Reform (1917–1921). London: H. Milford. Naumovi∆, Slobodan. 1998. “Romanticists or Double Insiders? An Essay on the Origins of Ideologised Discourses in Balkan Ethnology,” Ethnologia Balkanica, Vol. 2. Oldson, William. 1991. A Providential Anti-Semitism. Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth Century Romania. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Platon, Gheorghe. 1993. “Societatea româneasc¥ între medieval ºi modern,” in Platon, Gh., V. Russu, Gh. Iacob, V. Cristian, I. Agrigoroaiei, Cum s-a inf¥ptuit România modern¥. Iaºi: Editura Universit¥µii “Al. Cuza.” Popovici, Aurel. 1910. Naµionalism s¥u democraµie. O critic¥ a civilizaµiunii moderne. Bucharest: Minerva. Porter, Brian A. 1996. “The Social Nation and Its Futures: English Liberalism and Polish Nationalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Warsaw,” American Historical Review, No 5, December. Prodanovi∆, Jasa. 1947. Istorija politi∑kih stranaka i struja u Srbiji. I. Belgrade: Prosveta. Protokolite na Uchreditelnoto Narodno Sîbranie v Tîrnovo [The Minutes of the Constituent Bulgarian National Assembly in Tarnovo]. 1879. Plovdiv etc. R¥dulescu, Ion Eliade. 1916. Echilibrul între antiteze. vol. I., Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Roman, Andrea. 1999. Le Populisme Quarante-Huitard. Bucharest: Les éditions de la fondation culturelle roumaine. Suboti∆, Milan. 1992. Sricanje slobode. Ni≥: Gradina. Shemyakin, Andrej. 2000. “Serbiya na perelome. Obretenie nezavisimosti i problema modernizatsii,” Tokovi istorije, 1–2, Belgrade: INIS. Stan, Apostol. 1993. Ion C. Br¥tianu ºi liberalismul român. Bucharest: Globus. Stokes, Gale. 1975. Legitimacy through Liberalism: Vladimir Jovanovi∆ and the Transformation of Serbian Politics. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

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NEWSPAPERS: Chtlalishte, III, 1872 Gayda I–III 1864– Libertatea, III (1871) Makedoniya, I–V (1867–1871)

Narodnost, II (1869) Nezavisimost, III–IV (1873–1874) Svoboda, I–III (1870–1872) Zastava, IV (1869)

In Defiance of History Liberal and National Attributes of the Ottoman-Turkish Path to Modernity EYÜP ÖZVEREN

I. Writing of the nineteenth-century civilization so dear to him, the prominent Austrian—yet equally European—humanist Stefan Zweig spoke of its liberal cosmopolitanism with an understandably nostalgic tone. The confidence that fin de-siècle intellectuals such as Zweig had cultivated in a European ‘world order,’ distinguished by its principles of individual liberty, morality, and a sense of security coupled with a common civilization, was shattered by the advent of the divisive nationalism characteristic of the early twentieth century. The formative influence exerted by the nineteenth-century liberal world-view on the minds of Zweig and his contemporaries continued to define the parameters of their interpretation of the harsh twentieth-century realities they now came to confront. Zweig in particular had been an eyewitness of the disintegration from within of the secure bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ill-equipped with the inherent optimism of nineteenth-century liberal humanism, Zweig engaged himself heroically in an otherwise outdated and hence quixotic enterprise—one that would inevitably prove to be (literally) suicidal—that is, to speak as the conscience of a united Europe. In stark contrast to his original dream of becoming a ‘citoyen du monde,’ Zweig became ‘Heimatlos’ in a world in which countries, rather than being merely products of local culture and accidents of geography, as before, increasingly manifested themselves in terms of national identity cards, passports, and sometimes selectively intransigent boundaries (Zweig, 1996). If the Ottoman Empire was ‘the sick man of Europe’ in the nineteenth century—distinguished by its sense of insecurity and fragile peace concomitant with the less than inspiring tunes of the ‘Concert of Europe’— it would prove to be a good deal worse off in the much more challenging early twentieth-century environment, characterized by the notion of ‘the survival of the fittest.’ For the Ottoman intelligentsia, the ideals of Western liberalism and modernity that had filtered through their encounter with Europe were refracted through the prism of their own reality. Ottoman intellectuals had always entertained second thoughts concerning the universal validity of the principles of European liberal

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modernity. When the critical hour struck, they were better prepared to survive the shock of the demise of the world order that had exerted a formative influence on their perception of their historic mission and destiny. The leading cadres of the Turkish road to republicanism were therefore prepared to part company with their nineteenth-century heritage when called upon to play a radically different role in the early twentieth century. They were able to re-model their world-view in accordance with the pressing demands of the new age, and to abandon the idea of an imperial project for the sake of a realistic republican national program, as being the only feasible course to modernity. It was in this way that they became political heroes who defied history, fought a war of independence, and built up a republic, instead of confining themselves to the historically marginal role of isolated figures in a national literature whose survival was by no means guaranteed. When placed in a different light, the above shift takes on a new appearance. Whereas Ottoman intellectuals and leading cadres started off as liberals, the reality they confronted made them increasingly obliged to become nationalists as well. As will be seen in greater clarity below, those who resisted this tide remained an anomaly, whereas the majority combined a reasonable dose of nationalism with their liberal convictions. The transition from the Empire to the Republic was the turning point in this eventful history. Once the Republic was founded, however, the tension between the two competing processes could gradually grow, manifesting itself most openly during the last few decades. The fact remains that both nationalism and liberalism are only meaningful within the parameters of a modernity project, and as long as the modernity axis of the Turkish regime is not fully secured, the prospects of liberalism remain dim. In any case, I maintain that pure liberalism is essentially an illusion of the liberal mind, and that liberalism can only exist in combination with additional programs that provide the society in question with a structure and identity of its own. The Turkish twentieth-century experience of socio-historical transformation is highly instructive. The uniqueness of Turkey as an early case of modern nation-state building on the outer perimeter of Europe has already attracted much attention (Hobsbawm, 1987; Gellner, 1994), and a number of important elements have been explored. While one influential work concentrates on the class factor as the explanatory variable in its relationship to the state (Keyder, 1987), others (Zürcher, 1993; Ahmad, 1993) have singled out Turkey’s evolution along the axis of a specific institutional framework towards a modernity characterized in terms of political pluralism. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of this specificity is yet to be revealed and set against the backdrop of the existing world order. Before we proceed with this task, however, we need to develop a better picture of the nineteenth-century transformation of the Ottoman

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Empire. Amidst the story of increasing contact with Europe, it was then that the secret power of words such as ‘liberty’ (Hürriyet), ‘homeland’ (Vatan) and ‘nation’ (Millet) were first discovered and introduced into political and economic discourse. The nineteenth century provides us with both a solid background to understand the painful transition from a multinational empire to a national republic, and the grounds to identify the structural preconditions for the existence of modernity and liberty in this particular geography at the strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia.

II. Modern historiography of the Ottoman Empire has been moving from one extreme of emphasizing contrasts to the other extreme of emphasizing similarities. Whereas earlier work greatly exaggerated the differences between the classical period of the Ottoman Empire and Europe, more recent work with a micro-historical orientation has ushered in a revisionism that overlooks most differences, if not all, thereby throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A fine tuning of this scholarship remains to be achieved by way of theme-specific or time-specific comparisons. Whatever the initial structural differences between the Ottoman Empire and Europe may have been, by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the trajectories of Ottoman and world history converged, as the Ottoman Empire increasingly became an integral part of the world economic division of labor and the international power game. This meant, in effect, a protracted modification of the Ottoman state and economy under the exigencies of incorporation into the world system. Contemporary studies of the peripheralization and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire are written from the viewpoint of successor states and take for granted the nation-state phenomenon that replaced the multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. As such, they interpret the nineteenth-century transformation of the Ottoman Empire as a prolonged transition from the outdated imperial mode to that of the modern nation-state by way of disintegration. Not only is the realization of the nation-state seen as inevitable, but its role is also overemphasized at the expense of historical alternatives. We know for certain that within the international context of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, those who sought to replace the empire with nation-states succeeded in doing so. However, we also know that most successor nation-states, which were supposed to be the embodiments of modernity, have faced real problems in developing Western-type modern democratic regimes. Therefore, it is important to rethink the historical alternatives to nationalist projects in the Ottoman Empire (such as liberalism), for at least two reasons. First, they serve to historicize an overly naturalized period of history. Secondly, they shed light on the specific forms the nation-state

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project has taken in successor states, that is, they help to explain the deviations from the norms set by European modernity. Any comprehensive study of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire must address a number of fundamental questions. Foremost among these is a paradox: given that liberalism was a fashionable and often influential force on the ideological scene of the globally dominant nineteenth-century Europe, why was there so little of it in the late Ottoman Empire? In other words, what were the preconditions for, and obstacles to, the spread of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire? Was there a substantial difference between Ottoman liberalism and its European counterparts? Were the efforts to institutionalize liberalism in the Ottoman Empire a natural consequence of the increasing structural resemblance between the Ottoman Empire and European states, or were they the result of deliberate cultural lending and/or borrowing?1 Last but not least, what were the social origins of Ottoman liberalism, since it was brought in by a social stratum that identified itself with its European counterparts and sought to restructure society and politics in such a way that it could realize a commanding height for itself? In order to lay the foundations for answering these fundamental questions, I shall, for the time being, proceed with erecting a general framework in order to highlight some of the processes that determined the contours of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire. A few introductory observations are in order concerning the state of the Ottoman Empire in ‘the long nineteenth century.’ By this term, I mean the period extending from the French Revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Whereas in the eighteenth century a tendency towards decentralization prevailed, as provincial notables usurped the functions of the state, from the beginning of this period deliberate attempts were made to inaugurate a new working relationship between the state and the local potentates. It is important to note that the central state, while attempting to strengthen itself and to reassert some of its former rights, had to yield to a power-sharing arrangement (Sened-i I·ttifak) with the local notables, a novel phenomenon in Ottoman history which marked the birth of modern politics. The social forces to be recognized as adversary parties in this contract were the notables in the Balkan, but also the Anatolian, provinces. The prospect of Ottoman liberalism was therefore a matter of whether and to what extent this ‘socio-political space’ created by this historic contract could be preserved, so as to be occupied, eventually, by nineteenth-century liberals. While the conflict over the recentralization of the Imperial administra1

There is strong evidence to suggest that cultural lending was an important factor, second only to borrowing. As a matter of fact, the balance between the two shifted in favor of the latter in the course of time. See Mardin, 1962, p. 194.

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tion was under way, at a global level the French Revolution ushered in a new perception of politics by demonstrating the normalcy of change, be it by peaceful or by violent means. In the course of the nineteenth century, different social strata in the Ottoman Empire were more than willing to learn this lesson and pursue it to its logical conclusions. By the end of the period under consideration, the First World War had led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, much to the satisfaction of nationalist projects embraced by the varied peoples of this essentially multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. The above course entailed a radical shift in self-image and in the identification of enemies, as well as visions of past and future, individual and community, and the creation of a collective popular memory that had its links with a nascent conception of historiography. Before ‘the long nineteenth century,’ the Ottomans had looked on Europe with contempt, seeing in it an ‘enemy-image.’ After the French Revolution, the Ottomans learned to make out of this an image of the Other that, by way of cultural differences, could constructively be deployed in the redefinition of their own identity. Whereas before the French Revolution the Ottomans possessed a circular notion of time based on the principle of repetition, the universally proliferating idea of progress brought with it a linear conception of time in which past and future differed sharply. In a world in which the future would not necessarily repeat the past, a sense of vulnerability and extinction spread quickly, particularly among the weaker segments of society. On the linear trajectory that linked the past with the future, solidaristic communities seemingly had a better chance of survival than individuals. The shaky ground of empire gave way to nations with historic destinies that had yet to chart the map of the unknown future. This was indeed a century-long, painful and costly transformation in the Ottoman Empire, in which liberalism played only a minor role. Liberalism as a comprehensive nineteenth-century European worldview professed two axes, one economic, another political. As far as the economic realm was concerned, liberalism sought to expand the scope of the market to encompass the whole of the economy; laissez-faire economics argued for the efficiency of the market mechanism in regulating resource allocation both at home and abroad, that is, at the global level. Liberalism wished to reduce the role of the state in the economy in order to create more space for the self-regulating market mechanism. The critical issue here was the conviction that an enlarged market zone would help diffuse power among the many involved in economic transactions as constitutive of civil society. It was in this sense that the reinforcement of the market was also—and more importantly—a political project. With an increasingly diffused distribution of power, less direct political intervention in civil society would be required, and the political realm itself would become ephemeral. Ideally, a restricted political

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sphere would become the privileged domain of a representative democracy in which the atomized majority would participate as they did in the market itself. The primacy of the market over the political domain could be traced to the fact that “the classical assumptions about the nature and the natural state of man fitted the special situation of the market much better than the situation of humanity in general.”2 Ideally, a market would serve to reinforce democracy to the extent that individual rights and liberties were secured. It was argued that the economic and political dimensions of liberalism were inextricably linked. Hence, it would be impossible to default in one of the two domains and still be a liberal without contradicting oneself. More would be at stake than sheer logical consistency once the reconcentration of power, a threat to the market mechanism, returned. Be that as it may, liberal ideology was never as pure, as coherent, or as consistent in the political realm as it was in the economic one. This was because it hesitated between the logical necessity of a belief in popular government based on the principle of majority rule and a retreat to doctrines of natural law and natural rights, the latter largely in response to the historic threat that the masses posed to a rising middle-class which had not yet confidently established itself.3 This peculiarity gave liberalism a touch of flexibility with which it could be accommodated to a variety of circumstances.

III. As the market was an effective metaphor for the political domain then in the making, an analysis of the prospects of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire should continue with the drastic changes the economy underwent during the nineteenth century. It was then that the Ottoman Empire was forced to open up its economic space to world trade by consecutive 2 3

Hobsbawm, 1962, pp. 280–81. Hobsbawm, 1962, pp. 283–84. Schumpeter went on to say: “Not even economic liberalism was welcomed everywhere and by the whole business class; political liberalism came to large sectors of it like an undesired child”— Schumpeter, 1954, p. 394. “The Prussian government of the Stein–Hardenberg era, the Austro-Hungarian government from 1849 to 1859, and the Russian government throughout, are the most striking examples of governments that, though surely autocratic enough, adhered, so far as the principles and tendencies of their economic policy is concerned …”—Schumpeter, 1954, p. 394. Material conditions, particularly print capitalism, were as important for liberal and Ottomanist projects as they were for nationalism. Anderson’s exclusive focus on their impact on nationalism should not mislead us into overlooking their relevance for the historical alternatives to nationalism. See Anderson, 1991, pp. 37–46.

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treaties, the terms of which were dictated by the European powers, particularly the British. In essence, the purpose of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Trade Convention was to encourage the export of staple goods from the Ottoman Empire while turning it into an expanding market for European manufactures. The treaty was fully in accord with the interests of Britain, which had secured global hegemony for itself in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. If we recall that the Corn Laws still remained in effect in Britain, the treaty enforced free trade in the peripheral Ottoman Levant long before it was fully instituted in Britain (Puryear, 1931, pp. 122–24). The very fact that liberal economic objectives were introduced and promoted by means of direct foreign intervention was bound to leave a permanent imprint on Ottoman liberalism. The Ottoman state had to concede to free-trade policies in order to gain British support, both against the revolt of Muhammed Ali Pasha in Egypt and the Russian Empire seeking to expand southwards. There was a vociferous liberal opposition in Britain against supporting the Ottoman Empire. It was argued that the Ottoman Empire did not engage in free trade, and that the commercial prospects of Britain in Russia outweighed those in the Ottoman Empire (Hirst, 1968, pp. 12–14). Consequently, the Ottoman reformers and their supporters had to do something to make their country more attractive to British commerce. Not only did David Urquhart of the British consular mission in Istanbul help to create a favorable opinion regarding Ottoman trade prospects in Britain, but he also sought to spread free-trade liberalism among the Ottoman public. In the early 1840s, shortly after the Anglo-Ottoman Convention, the cosmopolitan press in Istanbul was enthusiastically engaged in popularizing the cause of free trade. Comparisons of the relative gains from free trade and from the old-fashioned protectionism characteristic of the Ottoman Empire were published in the press (Önsoy, 1988, p. 33). Hence, the principle of free trade penetrated into the Ottoman Empire as a prerequisite of the modern science of political economy, at a time when it remained a matter of dispute in Britain (Semmel, 1970, p. 154). According to the advocates of free trade in the Ottoman Empire, to doubt it would be tantamount to opposing science and modernity at a time when the nascent Ottoman intelligentsia’s wholesale commitment to the latter was beyond dispute (Haniog˘lu, 1984). Since the endorsement of liberal economic principles was assumed by the European powers and their affiliates meddling in Ottoman affairs, the prospective Ottoman liberals took the situation for granted, and thereby announced a critical interest in economics. Furthermore, the triangular relationship between Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Russia brought about a lasting shift in the Ottoman perception of identity and cultural difference. Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals learned to distinguish between the Russians, who

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posed a military threat to their very existence, and the British-led ‘Concert of Europe,’ which, although epitomizing the Other, became much less an historic enemy and more a potential ally. The extent to which liberal economic principles penetrated the Ottoman Empire is not as interesting a question as whether dissent from this viewpoint was forthcoming. After all, economic liberalism was the rule of the world as organized under British hegemony, and as the Ottoman Empire became integrated into this world, it inevitably found itself under its influence. On the other hand, exceptions to the rule deserve greater emphasis, as they represent a conscious reaction. A few critical minds, such as the famous public educator Ahmed Midhat Effendi, sowed the seeds of dissent at an early stage (Sayar, 1986, pp. 409–17). Their followers built up an opposition to the liberal principles spread by Sakızlı Ohannes Pasha and would eventually blame liberalism for the plight of Ottoman wealth, and seek dirigiste alternatives (Çavdar, 1992, pp. 117– 40). On the whole, the mercantile class, which would have been expected to support the liberal cause for the sake of its immediate economic interests, did not have to do so, precisely because the domain within which it prospered was defended by foreign powers and by the statesmen who traded the preservation of the political integrity of the empire for free trade (Tengirºenk, 1940). This does not mean that liberal policies did not find logically consistent advocates within the policy domain. Foremost among them was Cavit Bey, a native theoretician and an influential Minister of Finance in the post-1908 period. It is worth noting that the cosmopolitan port-city of Salonica, where he resided before going into politics, exerted a formative influence on his unyielding commitment to liberalism (Pirili, 1982, p. 143). Where economic necessity did not prevail, political voluntarism was able to come to the fore. It is for this reason that, from the beginning, whatever existed of Ottoman liberalism was tilted towards political philosophy and related objectives. It is no surprise that many Ottoman periodicals, including the influential Servet-i Fünun, were infused with liberal philosophy (Toprak, 1984, pp. 13–24). Furthermore, there was a deliberate attempt to blend liberal political aspirations with non-liberal elements, such as the modern idea of a nation or the predominantly Islamic official political culture of the Ottoman Empire (Mardin, 1962; Hourani, 1983, p. 343). It goes without saying that the inherently flexible nature of political liberalism referred to above helped rather than hindered this experimentation. Before proceeding further into the domain of politics, two major consequences of Ottoman integration into the world economy must be considered. First, the result of free trade policies as encouraged by the AngloOttoman Convention was to favor commercial interests over domestic

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manufacturing interests. Many of the traditional Ottoman manufactures could not survive competition with their European counterparts, and were either permanently destroyed, or were restructured to serve local and regional tastes in an increasingly stratified market (Pamuk, 1994, pp. 124–50). The traditional leverage of manufacturing interests over the state, which had never been strong, was lost forever. The mercantile interests advanced considerably, however, thanks to the opportunities created by the booming import–export trade. Instead of merely increasing the volumes traded by the commercial class, this entailed the rise of a new outward-looking merchant stratum. Second, the expansion of the import–export trade went together with shifts in trade routes, thereby redrawing the urban geographical map of the Ottoman Empire. While the traditional cities of the interior stagnated or declined, together with their urban networks, port-cities, benefiting from the advances in sail and steam navigation and the restoration of law and order in the Mediterranean, experienced unprecedented growth. These new urban centers became important loci of business and enlightenment, and invariably strongholds of bourgeois power. It is no coincidence that these new urban formations were dominated by ethnically or religiously differentiated populations capable of forming a bridge between the resident foreigners and the Muslims of the hinterlands. While this cosmopolitanism helped to promote business, the prospects for political involvement at the Imperial level for stigmatized minorities remained dim, that is, those who benefited most from the application of the economic principles of liberalism were, because of their identities, politically handicapped as far as participation in the making of a liberal project was concerned (Keyder, Özveren, and Quataert, 1993).

IV. The very possibility of a political domain for liberalism was demographically restricted in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the period under consideration, the Ottoman Empire witnessed successive territorial losses due to wars and national liberation struggles that exploited intraEuropean rivalries to their advantage. The demographic consequence of territorial shrinkage was of paramount importance. Given the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, encompassing a vastly differentiated and geographically specialized population, the successive losses of territory modified the critical balance between the various demographic components. Furthermore, as the Ottoman state lost its ability to resist European encroachment and to protect its subjects, and as the predominantly Christian European provinces of the Ottoman Empire broke away, one after another, the ethnically

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Turkish faction could no longer legitimately cast itself as the intermediary in an administration balancing Balkan and Levantine interests and mediating the relationship of vast Arab lands to the European world. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Turks found themselves facing an increasingly integrated Arab faction as the only other major element in the demographic power equation. It was no coincidence that the official policy of the Ottoman Empire insisted on counting Muslims as a single group, while classifying non-Muslims in terms of numerous subcategories (Karpat, 1985, p. 55). The dubious majority of the Turkish faction, together with its geographical concentration, defined the most important limit on any tendency towards a truly representative political system. In theory as well as in practice, the principle of direct proportional representation remained inconceivable, as it could have undermined the status of the ruling faction. Consequently, any demand for political representation had to accommodate itself to a communitybased system of numerically disproportionate representation. The establishment of a truly representative parliament was a common objective for different communities. However, after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908, the reluctance of the establishment, be it Imperial or communal, to adopt a ‘one-man, one-vote’ form of proportional representation remained (Davison, 1968, pp. 103, 107–108). This helped to alienate a growing segment of the population. The structural demographic limits contradicted the essence of liberal objectives that emphasized individual rights and liberties. On the whole, throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state was more inclined to trade local and regional representation for political participation at the imperial level. However, local and regional mechanisms of representation were more prone to reinforce communal identities based on ethnic and/or religious differences. Unfortunately, the reinforcement of communal identities at all levels as the building blocks of political representation offered a golden opportunity for nationalist projects, and they remained an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the liberal project. If the Ottoman Empire owed much to nationalism for its dismemberment, whatever existed of liberalism—despite its essential dissent from upholding the principle of a strong central state—did not benefit from the advance of nationalism. Quite the contrary: as liberalism and nationalism competed for the allegiance of the population, the success of the latter greatly hindered its prospects. After all, nationalist discourse emphasized authority and solidarity as the pragmatic means of delivering independence. The successful European unifying nationalist movements, such as those in Germany and Italy, had managed to reconcile liberal aspirations with nationalist fervor precisely because state-building and nation-building on a larger scale offered attractive opportunities to the middle class.

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It was different in the case of the Ottoman Empire. The common wisdom was that the imperial domain was being subjected to divisive pressures that would lead to its eventual dismemberment. It was also conceivable that this tendency had found receptive ground given the weakening of the state with the constant interference of the European powers. All the parties involved, including the European powers seeking to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, recognized that the state would play a central role if the empire were to be effectively restructured. The outcome of this consensus was to bestow upon the state the role of a reformer working towards the modernization-cumWesternization of the Ottoman Empire. As far as the specification of this goal was concerned, even the British did not dare impose their own image on the Ottoman Empire. It was for this reason that the reformers in proximity to the state were allowed to entertain the quasi-paternalistic idea of creating an Ottomanist identity. In 1855, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the influential British Ambassador, is quoted as having said that “if ever the Easterns get imbued with Liberal ideas of government their own doom is sealed” (Hornby, 1928, p. 74). At a time when, in the minds of the public, the territorial losses of the Ottoman Empire were associated with the weakness of the state, it was indeed difficult to defend the liberal objective of further constraining the prerogatives of the state in order to expand the scope of civil society via the strengthening of individual rights. Hence, the major dilemma of a potential liberal movement was how to advocate individual rights and liberties without being associated with the enemies of the state. Given this, as already hinted above, an overtly liberal position would make the ethnically and religiously differentiated commercial class of the international trade networks look all the more suspect. Furthermore, while the power of the peripheralized Ottoman state with respect to other states declined, general improvements in the technology of social and political control considerably increased the power of the same state vis-à-vis society (Shaw, 1968, p. 37; Davison, 1990, p. 147). Hence, a state that could legitimize itself less and less by resort to ideology alone found at its disposal novel means of coercion and manipulation. A prospective liberal found himself in a position in which he could not expect tolerance if he voiced his opposition to an increasingly autocratic regime. It is no coincidence that the last quarter of the nineteenth century up until the 1908 Revolution witnessed the reinvigorated despotism of Abdülhamid II, notorious for his intolerance of civil rights. This was a period when pro-reform or nationalist tendencies were put on hold or forced to go underground. The preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire against hostile foreign powers offered a valuable excuse for the systematic violation of civil liberties.

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V. Paradoxically, the Hamidian era was the heyday of Ottoman liberalism, even if many of its adherents chose exile in Europe or in Egypt over remaining underground at home. While these politically motivated liberals sought refuge elsewhere, economic liberalism found a most receptive ground to prosper under the tutelage of official policy. It is no coincidence that Ottoman laissez-faire thinking matured during this era, while political liberalism remained a cardinal sin. Sakızlı Ohannes Pasha’s trend-setting work in liberal economic theory was published in 1881, only to be followed by Cavit Bey’s culminating contribution at the turn of the century (Çavdar, 1992, pp. 54, 85). The flourishing of liberalism in both variants during this period ought to be understood in relation to two important factors. First, the Ottoman intelligentsia abroad was by then well prepared to come under the influence of liberalism that had exerted a formative effect on the European mind. The social and cultural milieu in which they found themselves registered the positive effects of a liberal world-view. Hence, the circumstances were ripe for the voluntary borrowing of liberalism in its political variant in combination with other fashionable views of the day (Haniog˘lu, 1989, p. 42). In these circumstances, unlike his Western European counterpart, who appeared as a middle-ground conservative in the political spectrum, the Ottoman liberal abroad was perforce a member of an allegedly extremist underground movement facing persecution at home. The second important factor involuntarily conducive to the spread of liberalism had to do with the form taken by state power in the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Abdülhamid’s success in instituting his highly personalized autocratic rule caused discomfort in a vast bureaucracy that was itself nurtured by the modernization of the state apparatus. Hence, some civil servants and officers were increasingly silenced and alienated from a regime that did not meet their high expectations and sought alternative rallying points around various notables (Hourani, 1968, p. 59). This meant an inevitable conflict within the state that would divide the ruling stratum and paralyze the regime. Until then, the new bureaucratic faction, seeking to re-promote reforms from above, was deprived of the means to express its viewpoint and to articulate its program of action. During this interregnum, Ottoman intellectuals abroad were in their most liberal phase, and had a golden opportunity to speak on behalf of society. The growing unpopularity of the Sultan induced the liberals to emphasize the difference between the sultan as an individual and the public office he held as defined by constitutional law or tradition. By pursuing this logic a step further, they were able to question the legitimacy of the regime. It is no surprise that the Congress of Ottoman Liberals

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held its two meetings in exile during this period (Hourani, 1983, pp. 263–65). Not only did they advocate a political stance in conformity with the main tenets of liberal thought, but they opened their minds to the influence of Demolins and Le Play, while trying to confront the less liberal leanings of leading Ottoman positivists. Prominent among the liberals was Prince Sabahattin, who articulated a program distinguished by the principles of individual initiative and decentralization, which divided the opposition in exile (Ülken, 1979, p. 129). Irrespective of the differences in their social background, upbringing, and intellectual preoccupations, the aspiring Ottoman liberals felt more at home in Europe than in their homeland. This brief moment of diaspora liberalism did not last long. Once the popular Constitutional Revolution of 1908 succeeded in resolving the crisis within the state by the deposition of the autocratic sultan, the new cadres of the bureaucracy and the army gained the upper hand in political life. Although the Ottoman liberals played a significant role in shaping public opinion during this tumultuous period, they could not possibly exercise ideological hegemony. The Liberal Party of the day, Ahrar, remained ephemeral at best (Lewis, 1968, p. 209). The world had changed: liberalism was now being widely contested on its own European terrain by a number of rival ideologies. Particularly attractive to the Ottoman bureaucratic and intellectual circles were the non-liberal, solidaristic, and developmentalist lessons of a unified Germany that seemed to be challenging British global hegemony. Endorsed by these social groups, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) rapidly established its control over the political life of the country. The CUP nevertheless subscribed to liberal economic policies and made Cavit Bey Minister of Finance. This trend continued until the First World War, when the Ottoman government unilaterally abolished the capitulations and privileges that had condemned the Ottoman Empire to free trade. The Ottoman experiments with protectionist developmentalism under the rubric of ‘National Economy’ (Milli I·ktisat) signalled the passing of the state’s commitment to liberal economic policies within a war context and the eventual victory of the critiques of economic liberalism (Toprak, 1982, pp. 25–30).

VI. The 1908 Revolution accelerated the divergence of the two variants of liberalism by consolidating the economic one as official policy and marginalizing the political liberals as the ‘loyal opposition.’ Contrary to expectations, and influenced by the universalist liberal doctrine that the expansion of economic liberalism would inevitably lead to political liberalism based on the principle of representation, the Ottoman Empire

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witnessed the opposite course of events. Far from undermining the bureaucracy, economic liberalism served to strengthen and consolidate a political cadre dedicated to modernization that would part ways with economic liberalism as soon as a more hospitable international context appeared on the horizon. This is not a paradox as long as one is not swayed by liberal ideology. The division of liberalism into two components, one economic and the other political, is fully justified and not historically specific to the Ottoman Empire. The self-regulating market is not as natural a state as liberalism claims; rather it is historically and socially instituted. The very construction of a market mechanism entails massive political restructuring that modernizes and legitimizes the state as the cohesive framework within which the market is contained. Historically speaking, economies became market-oriented precisely because states implemented policies that paved the way for it. If this was true of nineteenth-century Britain, the privileged domain of liberalism, then it must have been even more so for the Ottoman Empire, whose problems were compounded by the costly readjustment of the state’s relationship to the economy within the context of its peripheralization in a world characterized by uneven development. As such, the historical experience of the Ottoman Empire emphasizes the inherent flaw in liberal thinking, a flaw which could have gone unnoticed in the case of exemplary Britain had it not been for Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 1944). From 1908, the CUP governments subscribed to a program of political modernization within a constitutional framework that favored the strengthening of the state apparatus over a liberal emphasis on individual rights. They embraced Ottomanism as an official ideology while some prominent members experimented with Pan-Turkist and PanIslamist ideas. Meanwhile, the opposition to the CUP resorted to political liberalism. The populist rhetoric of the CUP, in combination with its vast political machine, constituted at the imperial level in proximity to the state apparatus, gave it a significant edge over its loosely organized liberal rivals. Once back from exile, the liberals found themselves at a disadvantage, excluded as they were from the state structures on which the CUP was able to rely. The political parties they formed never penetrated deeply into society, nor did they develop horizontally to form provincial networks. Consequently, they had to rely on the popularity of prominent names in order to win parliamentary seats. This meant, above all, an uneasy alliance with traditional notables in the provinces. Whereas for the CUP, strong in the center, peripheral notables were only one of many forces with which tactical alliances could be made, they became the backbone of loosely organized liberal politics under the banner of the Liberal Union (Mardin, 1975, pp. 18–19). From time to time, the liberals

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built alliances with religious conservatives who categorically rejected Westernization and the institutional framework on which the very survival of the liberals depended. Their success in by-elections reflected discontent with CUP policies rather than a genuine endorsement of their political objectives. The liberals enjoyed one last period of popularity before the First World War. Had it not been for the CUP’s desperate commitment to the obsessive centralization of the state apparatus, the liberals may not have captured the public imagination by advocating administrative decentralization. In this way, the Liberal Union, the political successor to Ahrar, obtained the support of local and regional communities seeking various degrees of autonomy (Hourani, 1983, p. 282; Tunaya, 1952, pp. 315–23). For the first time, they acquired a social basis outside Istanbul. It seemed that they would be able to form a working relationship with the merchant communities of the port-cities. However, uniting these disparate elements was no easy task. Without transcending their provincial horizons, leading inhabitants of the port-cities could not possibly have a say in politics at the level of the imperial state. Precisely because the Ottoman Empire did not possess either an effective communications network or an empire-wide daily press, the traditional provincialism that went hand in hand with linguistic diversity had not given way to a unifying outlook and language. The material conditions that would have enabled the liberals to speak to one another as well as to the population as a whole were sadly lacking. In a sense, the eventual failure of Ottomanism as the favorite ideology of the nineteenth-century reformers is traceable to the same set of conditions. After all, both Ottomanism and liberalism sought to displace divisive communal identities based on the principles of religion and ethnicity. Such identities were constituted at an intermediary level, that is to say, above the individual and below that of the Ottoman Empire as a whole. Ideally, Ottomanism wished to transcend the intermediary identities by constituting an all-embracing supra-identity in which former subjects would participate as equal citizens. Liberalism wished to proceed in the opposite direction by liberating individuals from all types of secondary identity so that everyone could ideally engage in reciprocal exchange and contract, be it economic or political, and thereby become the voluntary building blocks of a social system. Suspicious of one another, Ottomanism and liberalism nevertheless shared the same impasse. The socio-cultural networks, too weak to support either Ottomanism or liberalism at the level of the Ottoman Empire, were nevertheless strong enough to give a critical boost to intermediary identities operating on the optimal scale, and well on their way to becoming nation-state projects. In summary, the ‘empire versus nation-state’ dichotomy was resolved in favor of the latter as much because the national projects proved them-

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selves successful as because the imperial project of redressing the Ottoman Empire by way of modernization and gradual liberal adjustments could not be pursued any further. During the ‘long nineteenth century,’ the Ottoman self-image had been subject to constant modification and reduction in scope, from one which, under the label ‘us,’ comprised all Ottoman subjects, to one that was reduced to include only cultural but not necessarily ethnic Turks. In juxtaposition to this rapidly shifting self-image, there emerged a crystallizing notion of ‘them.’ Whereas the enemy-image originally consisted of all others, during the nineteenth century it underwent a fracture. Largely because of the immediate Russian military threat, the Ottomans learned to differentiate between Russians and Europeans. Whereas the Russians became the typical enemy, Europeans were conceived as ‘Others’ who were not necessarily enemies. Furthermore, the Ottomans learned to foster alliances with European powers against the Russians as well as how to play one power against another. As ‘Others,’ the Europeans could be legitimately imitated by the Ottomans and in this way helped to shape their new identity. Precisely because the Ottomans saw themselves as under threat of military defeat, potential imperial disintegration, and probable demographic extinction, a solidaristic mood prevailed over individualism. The ‘people’ could survive as a nation only if its internal cohesion and solidarity were preserved and enhanced. To accomplish this, however, one had first to invent a collective memory through the prism of which the past could be reinterpreted. Hence, it is no coincidence that the Turkish national identity, no different from its ethnic counterparts, chose conveniently to forget liberal undercurrents of the nineteenthcentury experience that did not fit in well with the creation of a unilinear legacy for the realization of the modern nation-state.

VII. Looking back to the nineteenth century, it is somewhat surprising that it took almost a century for the Young Turk4 revolt to materialize (in 1908) as a reaction to the peripheralization of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks wanted to refound the Empire in accordance with a model which bore the heavy imprint of the more developed Balkan provinces. However, with the disastrous loss as early as 1912–13 of the Balkan territories, including Salonica, where the underground Young Turk organiza4

Whereas the label ‘Young Turk’ is usually indiscriminately applied to a whole range of opponents to the autocratic regime of Sultan Hamid II (1876–1908), it ought to be applied only to those who first built up the clandestine Committee of Union and Progress that later came to constitute the political party of the same name.

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tion was formed (Tekeli and Ilkin 1980)5, the new regime was deprived of its best political and economic asset and, territorially speaking, had to settle for second best. Geopolitically speaking, the Ottoman Empire no longer controlled the Balkans from a center of gravity in Istanbul, located between the two continents over which the Empire had spread more or less uniformly, but tilted heavily towards the Middle East and its primarily Muslim population. Furthermore, as the Arab intelligentsia was increasingly attracted by European-type nationalistic ideas and the Turks were no longer able to act as power broker between the Christians of the Balkans and the Arabs of the Middle East, the constitutional monarchist ideal of the Young Turks became impossible to maintain: truly democratic elections would have placed the Turks in a precarious position in the Parliament. It was in this context that the CUP betrayed its popular ideals, lost touch with the general public, and became increasingly authoritarian. The centralization of power served to displace any prospect of democratic representation; however, this paved the way for a thorough recentralization and—albeit partial—rationalization of the state apparatus in tune with modernity. In the First World War, the CUP chose to throw in its lot with the Germans, who had risen to contest British global hegemony. It was clear to the CUP leadership that an all-out struggle for world dominance was under way; however, they made the tragic error of assuming that the contest would be resolved once and for all. On the contrary, as far as the global configuration of international power was concerned, the First World War ended indeterminately. The contest for global hegemony was thus put on hold until the end of the Second World War. This short-sightedness would cost the Ottoman government its political sovereignty and independence under the Sevres Treaty. The rather unrealistic CUP leadership was unwilling to settle for anything less than an imperial solution: in place of the now defunct Ottoman Empire, they sought to substitute Pan-Turkist, if not Pan-Islamist imperial projects with little likelihood of their realization. This entailed an artificial fostering of Pan-Turkist and Islamist identities that would eventually develop into irreconcilable alternatives. A further unintended consequence deserves emphasis: the special circumstances of the war provided the newly recentralized and partly modernized state with a golden opportunity to experiment with a war economy. This was the first 5

There is ample evidence in various autobiographies and memoirs concerning the formative influence of Balkan geography and defeat on the mentality of the Ottoman intellectuals, most notably prominent Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) members (Edib-Adıvar, 1967, pp. 150–60; Uzer, 1979). The Balkan heritage of the Turkish provisional left also commands attention (Tunçay and Zürcher, 1994, pp. 164–65).

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instance in which the strong state tradition was deployed rationally to effect social and economic organization with a corporatist slant (Toprak, 1982). As such, it was a valuable experience in learning-by-doing that would be passed on to its successor state. Moreover, the lessons of this experience could later be exploited in order to circumvent Islamist and Pan-Turkist alternatives and instead create a modern national identity. The successive military defeats of the Ottomans in the immediate aftermath of the 1908 Revolution, first in the Balkan War (1912), then in the Italian War in Libya, and finally in the First World War, can best be seen as episodes in a single prolonged war, culminating in the subsequent turn of the tide in the War of Independence (1919–23). As far as the Ottomans were concerned, this was one long critical period during which the very existence of their country was challenged, their identity put into question, and their world-views reshaped.6 It should be noted that the 1908 Revolution was an open call for a social revolution; as such, it paved the way for a struggle between the old forces and the new, as manifest in the contest between sultanism and parliamentary monarchism, that would eventually be resolved in favor of republicanism.7 This social conflict was refracted by the prolonged war that brought into the 6

Now a classic of political thought for its attempted theoretical evaluation of the alternatives open to the Ottoman Empire, such as Ottomanism, PanIslamism, and Pan-Turkism,Yusuf Akçura’s Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset [Three Types of Politics] was first published in 1904 (in Egypt, in order to avoid Hamidian censorship). It comes as no surprise that Akçura, who favored Pan-Turkist ideals, was an immigrant from a Turkic province of the Russian Empire. It should be noted that this text gained further recognition only in 1912 when it was reprinted in Istanbul. Its basic theses were hotly debated during the early twentieth century as the Ottoman Empire entered into a critical era of identity crisis (Akçura, 1976). The prominent feminist Halide Edib wrote her utopia, meaningfully entitled Yeni Turan (The New Turan), with reference to the renewal of the legendary homeland of the ancient Turks as a “liberal and democratic” Turkey (Edib-Adıvar, 1967, p. 153). In his memoirs, Muhittin Birgen noted how the CUP itself was forced to accept Turkish nationalism despite its original commitment to the principle of Ottomanism (Arıkan, 1997, pp. 3–4). The conception of linguistic purification as an axis for the construction of a Turkish national identity was also novel during this era (Seyfettin, 1993). The most important ideologue of the Turkist wing of the CUP, Ziya Gökalp, in his manifesto of 1923 gave a realistic tinge to Turkist thought by re-anchoring it within the realm of the Turkish nation-state and thereby differentiating it from Pan-Turkist aspirations towards Turan (Gökalp, 1963). 7 The Ukrainian revolutionary Frunze gives an eyewitness account from below of how the deep roots of sultanism among the populace were dealt a deadly blow as early as 1921 when the sultan aligned himself with the occupation forces and the Parliament demonstrated that self-rule without the sultanate was possible (Frunze, 1996, p. 51).

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foreground the immediate threat of military and demographic extinction. Far from making redundant the social and political struggle, however, the war offered a more effective means of resolving the conflict between the old and the new. It is no coincidence that those who finally won the War of Independence in 1923 were responsible for creating a republic founded exclusively on modernist principles. Furthermore, in this protracted phase of identity formation, the majority of influential Ottomans shifted their allegiance, by way of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism, from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism. Hence, one major by-product of this period was the genesis of Turkish national identity in the context of a prevailing sense of imminent extinction and as a reaction8 to other undesirable options, including ethnic nationalisms of various sorts, that served to divide up the territories of the Ottoman Empire (Berkes, 1975). On the verge of the declaration of the Republic, the collective memory of the people was re-shaped after decades of incessant warfare. Historically speaking, as already discussed, the Ottomans had conceived Europeans as the ‘Other’ in creating their self-image; while they had also found historical adversaries in, for example, Iran, the role of such bitter rivals in the shaping of their identity had been minimal. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire became a constant menace in the north, periodically expanding at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. With the Russian threat hanging over them, Ottoman statesmen began to develop mixed feelings about their European counterparts: the ‘Other’ against whom popular identity was being reshaped gradually became Russian rather than European. With memories of the First World War and the War of Independence still fresh, popular feelings changed considerably. The immediate military threat was now identified as in the vicinity, that is, in the neighboring countries. Second thoughts about Europeans, already well under way, ushered in a new period during which Turkish statesmen and intelligentsia professed to contest Europeans on their own terms; put another way, the idea was to become European in terms of fundamental values, despite the Europeans, if necessary. This was a novel sense of the ‘Other’ in the recasting of a national identity: the objective now was not to reinforce elements of cultural difference, but to emulate the manifest superiorities of the historic ‘Other.’ This process was further accentuated by the fact that the appeal to 8

The Turkish War of Independence has also been rightly interpreted as the last link in a chain of national geographical revolts against the Ottoman Empire. As such, it is the revolt of Anatolia against Istanbul, the seat of the cosmopolitan sultanate and the occupation forces (Selek, 1973, pp. 67, 221–24). Even so, many of the leading cadres had a strong Balkan background that had shaped their world-view, as already argued. If anything, Anatolia provided a receptive soil for their already shaped political stance.

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Islam had not fostered any substantial support from the Muslims of the Middle East during the First World War; far from it, many Arabs had cooperated with the British against the Ottomans in order to secure their independence. The Turks felt betrayed by this; in this context, they wanted to part company with their own past, so overdetermined were they by religious and Middle Eastern allegiances—their erstwhile brothers suddenly became their ‘Other.’ This matrix of forces defined in terms of identity and difference helped to determine the orientation of the Republic. The novelty of the Turkish path can be better understood by way of a comparison with the Russian case. In Russia, the Westernizers and Slavophiles had constituted two opposite poles in a controversy in which the Slavophiles romantically emphasized national virtues, peasant culture and folklore, insisting on a return to the Russian ‘essence’ in reaction to the assimilationist tendencies of the Westernization process. In the Turkish case, those who looked to the peasantry, cultural specificity, and national identity and independence at the same time insisted on the adoption of universal Western values. In this way, a deepening of the sense of national identity was seen as compatible with a return to the so-called essential values, a must for nationalism. The Turkish leadership was able to reconcile a return to the essence of allegedly Turkish culture with the adoption of Western values because the ideal Turkish culture was understood in terms of folkloric and prehistorical elements. Precisely because the Republic was a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, it chose to leave the history of the Ottoman Empire in the dark and to shift emphasis to the pre-Imperial history of the Turks. The simplicity of the characteristics of nomads and peasants could easily be reconciled with Western values. A comparison with Greece is illuminating in this respect: because modern Greeks saw their history as an insurrection against the Ottoman yoke, they could seek ideological refuge in the idea of resurrecting a new Byzantine Empire. The fact that they were able to resort to an alternative imperial project, beyond the capabilities of a weak modern state unable to subdue a diaspora bourgeoisie, led them to disaster in Asia Minor in 1922. The Turks were more fortunate, in the sense that, having revolted against a defunct empire, they had no realistic alternative but to build up a modern nation-state. Hence the war in Anatolia became a mechanism by means of which a nation could be created out of those with a collective experience of warfare, thereby momentarily delineating them from their brethren elsewhere. Unlike the Young Turks, with whom they represented a major discontinuity, the founders of the Turkish Republic were clearly territorialists—and therefore realists—in terms of their political objectives. They were not only forced, but willingly chose to substitute a medium-sized independent and sovereign nation-state for the then void Ottoman Empire; they sought demographic and cultural homogeneity in place of

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Ottoman heterogeneity and were determined to relegate the existing religious homogeneity to the background in order to construct a common secular identity. The abolition of the khalifate clearly marked a turning-point in the history of the Middle East. The Republicans were frustrated by the ability of the khalifate to serve as a rallying point for the now marginalized anti-Republican forces. The abolition of the khalifate also revealed the determination of the Republicans to steer clear of any form of interference in networks extending beyond their borders and in the Islamic world. The Republicans were territorialists in the strict sense of the term, consciously choosing to put their own house in order rather than getting carried away by involvement in regional and global conflicts. First and foremost, the Kemalist priorities in this connection included state-building in the modern sense, relying on cadres who found themselves migrants in the new Anatolia-centered republic. It is no coincidence that many of the leading figures in the new Republican regime had their family origins in either the Balkans or the Caucasus and the Russian periphery9; as such, they were aliens in their new country that had yet to develop into a modern state. The aspirations of the elite that had originated elsewhere were hence transplanted onto Anatolian soil that still left much to be desired in terms of prolonged fertility. Second among the Kemalist priorities was the task of nation-building by way of homogenizing a population based on the principle of modern nationality. This meant cutting off prospective citizens from their religious and/or ethnic affiliations abroad—as well as from their own past—by a series of reforms. The modernization of education on a secular basis came about in 1924. Further reforms included the enactment of a Turkish civil code in 1926, the transition to Western temporal codes in 1926, the adoption of European dress in 1926, and the Romanization of the alphabet in 1928. Such measures, so often underestimated in terms of their effects as ‘superstructural’ and ‘epiphenomenal,’ radically transformed the structures of everyday life10 and created a lacuna that went hand in hand with a social amnesia favorable to the implantation of modernity without too much resistance. In fact, they were tantamount to a social revolution, although many of the ideas that formed the embryo of these reforms were first put forward under the Ottoman Empire. The measures for the simplification of Ottoman Turkish and the adoption of the Latin alphabet had met with resistance, just as Midhat Pasha’s

9

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself had been exposed to the formative influences of Macedonia (Afetinan, 1981, p. 5). 10 Changes in the structures of daily life were clearly visible to foreign observers (Roger, 1930; Bourgoin, 1936).

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arguments in favor of a Western civil code were countered by Cevdet Pasha’s overtly religious alternative (Ülken, 1979, pp. 340–41). It required not only time but a reconfiguration of social forces in the context of a prolonged war culminating in the War of Independence to transform these ideas into facts of life. At the same time, because these reforms came as part of a mutually reinforcing program, their effect far outweighed what it might have been if they had been introduced piecemeal. Within less than a decade the entire institutional matrix of daily life was transformed. A third important task facing the Kemalist regime was massive economic reconstruction and particularly industrialization, singled out as a structural prerequisite for the emergence of the much desired Europeantype society, by which they understood a ‘class-based society’ in which the urban elements would play a major part without necessarily tearing apart the social fabric by means of overt class conflict.11 Hence, Turkish society was expected in due course to acquire a strong bourgeois component; ideally, this would involve the diffusion of a bourgeois worldview in harmony with a modernist state professing liberal credentials. This goal was clearly present in the minds of the leadership; it remained to be seen how it might be achieved. The Kemalists’ policies of social transformation were essentially pragmatic. Far from making choices after extensive deliberations, they acted in accordance with what actual circumstances dictated. Their pragmatism delivered the expected results. As the Kemalists were determined to break with the past that they blamed for the misfortunes of the Ottoman Empire and the backwardness of Anatolia, the heartland of the republic, they dealt with the reactionary opposition in a different way from their other opponents. The Republican regime embarked upon a policy of selective tolerance and repression (Timur, 1993, p. 289), the former being exercised towards those who voiced criticisms within a modernist perspective, the latter towards those who were identified with reactionary objectives and who resorted to violence (Lewis, 1968, p. 290). Since the Republicans sought actively to reproduce the Western model, they regretted the absence of a European-style entrepreneurial

11

The radical Kemalist vision of a class-based society without class conflict was certainly utopian. However, the Kemalists have been unfairly criticized for their determination to resist class conflict, particularly in the 1930s, by scholars who interpret it as evidence of their essentially anti-liberal and antidemocratic credentials (see Köker, 1993, pp. 211–29). It should be noted that overt class conflict was also an occasional attribute of liberal democratic societies. Moreover, according to the liberal ideal of society, class conflict is incidental to social and political life, and is seen as an indication that a given society is not yet fully organized in accordance with the principles of liberalism.

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class. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had brought with it the virtual liquidation of an ethnically differentiated merchant class (Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Christian Arabs) concentrated in the port cities. Above all, the exchange of minorities with Greece was largely responsible for the concentration of a rich entrepreneurial class there and for the disproportionate number of bureaucrats in Turkey. The founders of the republic were well aware of their relative strength vis-à-vis civil society; not only did they have the upper hand in determining the course of social and economic transformation, but they also used their power effectively in order to develop a middle class that had previously been conspicuous by its absence. In the course of economic development, the state was to substitute for this class, and eventually to nurture it as a consequence of its economic undertakings. It should be noted that the overarching objective was not to attain economic development in itself, but to use it as a means of accomplishing the emergence of a Europeantype society. The Kemalists saw economic policy as part of a comprehensive social and political program of transformation that would make Turkey a European nation-state professing the values of modernity. Before the inauguration of state-centered economic development policies in the wake of the Great Depression, there was a brief period of economic laissez-faire and free trade from 1923 to 1929. This was, in part, due to the provisions of the Lausanne Treaty, which constrained the new state’s right to exercise effective monetary policy, and put into effect a foreign trade regime, until 1930.12 Even so, this period represented a last opportunity to implement liberal ideas within the parameters of nationalism as invigorated by the Turkish War of Independence; not only did the government put into effect essentially liberal economic policies first formulated in the I·zmir Economic Congress (1923), fitting in well with the nineteenth-century political economic heritage of liberalism (Tezel, 1982, pp. 135–39), it also experimented with the idea of a multi-party system that was expected in the course of time to approximate Western-style pluralist democracy. However, this period was brought to an abrupt end with the Great Depression. The Great Depression of 1929 made it easier for the Republican People’s Party to pursue its political and economic objectives. The breakdown of the world market was a blessing in disguise for peripheral countries, creating as it did a pretext for radical restructuring. In general, there emerged in the countries on the verge of economic take-off a favorable climate for local capital accumulation independent of the core zones

12

However, given the favorable world situation, there is no evidence to suggest that the state would have opted for an alternative developmental strategy had these constraints not existed (Keyder, 1982).

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of the world economy; for Turkey in particular, the deteriorating terms of trade for exporters of primary goods, the balance-payments crisis, and the revenue crisis of the central state exerted sufficient pressure to bring forth a relatively isolationist import-substituting industrialization strategy which fitted well with the priorities of the regime. As the Republicans had already opted for an intensive and inwardlooking transformation of Turkish society, and since substantial ground was covered towards consolidating basic institutions during the 1920s, the state could now help to accelerate the pace of history; in other words, the nation-state-building efforts of the 1920s were a precondition for the success of the economy-building attempts of the 1930s. While purely economic opportunities for growth existed for all less-developed countries, only those few that had already built up a modern state could make use of them. In turn, the countries that were able to exploit these opportunities further legitimized their state apparatus and its specific relationship to a society undergoing transformation. The cumulative effect of this process undid whatever was left of the special relationship which liberalism claimed existed between the state and civil society: far from remaining as the distinct realms envisaged by liberal ideology, in this context state and society were fused, and the civil character of society became increasingly attenuated. It goes without saying that Turkey had embarked on a prolonged phase of modernization divorced from liberalism in the economic and political senses. Along the axis of modernization, Turkey continued to converge with European standards; because, at this specific conjuncture, liberalism also came under heavy fire in Europe, its former homeland, the civilizational disparity between Turkey and Europe did not increase to the disadvantage of the former. The Lausanne Treaty, which established a framework for peace and international recognition on terms largely favorable to the republic, had already proved that the new Turkish state, as heir to the Ottoman Empire, was a master at exploiting interstate rivalries. The foreign policy expertise of the new regime would attain its most mature form during the Second World War, culminating in an exemplary neutrality that has attracted considerable scholarly attention (Weisband, 1973; Deringil, 1989). The intermediate step in this process was taken during the interwar period, however, when the new state learned to translate systematically geostrategic advantages into economic benefits by way of an original foreign policy designed to exploit the possibilities of an interstate power game. It was at this time that the Turkish state turned Western European–Soviet mistrust to its own advantage, thereby inventing the policy of non-alignment, long before the heyday of Third Worldism. The readiness of the Soviet government to provide financial and technical assistance in the implementation of a planned development strategy, and the ability of the Turkish government to convince European states

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to provide similar support in order to offset first, the Soviet and later, their other European rivals’ influence, enabled the regime to adopt and sustain a dirigiste economic policy. The state, by virtue of its banks and state economic enterprises, and its ability to manipulate prices in favor of domestically manufactured goods, intervened actively in an otherwise decreasingly market-oriented economy. Whereas the Great Depression stimulated protectionist reactions and sui generis import-substitution in most semi-peripheral states, in Turkey protectionism was coupled with an outright étatisme modelled in light of the lessons of Soviet planned development and the Italian experimentation with a non-liberal ‘third path.’ Turkey’s overtly dirigiste orientation was more a symptom of the comparative weakness of domestic economic forces than a conscious choice of extremist developmentalism. Precisely because the private sector was relatively undeveloped in terms of its share of the economy and underdeveloped in terms of its concentration in commercial and speculative instead of manufacturing activities, as a second-best solution the state had to assume a direct role in mobilizing economic resources. This approach helped move forward the economy in general and not just the public sector (Boratav, 1990, p. 57; Kuruç, 1987, p. 219). In fact, the indirect stimulus of state policies on the private sector, by integrating the national economic space by means of railways and creating a favorable environment through subcontracting, may have been more important than its direct contribution to output through state economic enterprises. Even more important was the conscious cultivation and articulation within networks of a stratum of nascent business interests that could hopefully take part in a bourgeois social and political project in tune with liberal modernity. Hence, the outright anti-liberal rhetoric of the time should not obscure the fact that, in spite of everything, beneath the great transformation there was a potentially liberal project in the making.

VIII. The 1950s stand out in modern Turkish history as the period during which a multi-party political system was effectively instituted. Post-1950 Turkish political history forms a sharp contrast with the interwar period, and has been subjected to considerable scholarly attention because of its original dynamics (Ahmad, 1977). Turkey’s transition to a competitive political system was part and parcel of the post–Second World War reorganization of the world under the hegemony of the USA. Turkey chose to participate in the Western alliance by joining its defense system and professing its fundamental values, including freedom of choice, economic and otherwise. Hence, Turkey, politically oriented towards the

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West, was cut off economically from the northeast.13 Moreover, because of the outright priority given to strategic concerns in this reorientation, among the Western nations Turkish policy was directed more towards the USA, the hegemonic power, than towards Europe. This has had important long-term implications. Until that time, Turkey had taken up the European social system unquestioningly as the model for her own modernization efforts. Henceforth, the predominance of this model was challenged. Furthermore, Turkey was able to reject a number of characteristics of European modernity and to opt for alternatives that, with American encouragement, were flourishing all over the world. An important result of this course was that the Turkish multi-party political system did not measure up to the rigid standards set by its European precursors in political liberalism. However, the very fact that a multi-party system came into existence and remained in place, in spite of (brief) interruptions, demands explanation. Even if the transition to a multiparty system was encouraged by Turkey’s decision in favor of the NATO alliance, the fact that democracy was able to survive must call our attention to the factors which made it possible within the social formation. Had it not been for Kemalism, a smooth transition to a democratic system in Turkey would probably have remained impossible. As we have seen, Kemalism’s overall commitment to the eventual creation of a European-type society as the ultimate goal of modernization had conferred a paternalistic role upon the state (Özbudun, 1981). It should be noted that one of the building blocks of the republic was the principle of popular sovereignty as exercised by a parliament. The Kemalist revolt against the sultan in Ankara was legitimized along the axis of parliamentary representation. Precisely because the last Ottoman sultan had dismissed the parliament summoned after the 1908 Revolution, an alternative national parliament in defiance of the sultan’s authority was called in Ankara, the seat of the provisional government.14 The Turkish War of Indepen13

This preference was bound to put Turkey at odds with her Eastern Bloc neighbors. As strategic concerns came to the fore with the consolidation of the Iron Curtain, Turkey was increasingly deprived of reciprocal interaction in the direction of the northeast. Nevertheless, the geostrategic benefits that accrued in return for joining the Western alliance partly offset the potential economic losses resulting from the concomitant lack of access to the Black Sea world to which Istanbul could have served as the economic gateway (Kruger, 1981, pp. 145–46). 14 Because the sultan had dismissed the parliament in Istanbul, the provisional assembly was legitimized as the sole representative of the people. However, the provisional parliament insisted that it had not revolted against the sultan and was in fact struggling to emancipate the sultanate from the hands of the occupying forces. Therefore, the provisional parliament did not profess republican credentials, but pretended that it was fulfilling its mission as an institution of the constitutional monarchy (Velidedeogˇ lu, 1991, 245).

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dence was conducted within the framework of parliamentary politics. Within the first parliament, a multiplicity of views had been expressed, often at odds with the expectations of the leading cadres (Velidedeog˘lu, 1990). Moreover, the conservative opposition had not only shared a basic commitment to the principle of national sovereignty—if not to the objective of progressive reformism—but had contributed with its criticisms to the exercise of constitutional government under the most difficult circumstances (Demirel, 1994).15 Already during the period of one-party regime, two attempts had been made from within the higher echelons of the political establishment to introduce a second party, first, in 1924 and then, in 1930.16 It should be noted that these attempts were all the more important for having been made during an interwar European conjuncture in which political pluralism in the traditional liberal sense was coming under attack from both Left and Right in its very homeland; disillusioned political movements everywhere were contesting the equation of democracy and multi-party competition, and exploring better ways of expressing the will of the people in politics without recourse to political intermediaries. With liberal politics on the decline, this quest paved the way for the emergence of totalitarian single-party regimes of a communist or a fascist bent. The fact that the Kemalist regime consciously chose to avoid professing an affinity with such totalitarian alternatives in itself casts doubt on the validity of the characterization (Köker, 1993) of Kemalism as 15

When judged in terms of exclusively democratic criteria, the contribution of the opposition in the first parliament was indeed positive. However, when the criterion of assessment becomes that of modernization, the opposition constituted a significant obstacle to reform (Berkes, 1978, pp. 493–96). 16 The formation of the Progressive Republican Party in 1924, only a year after the proclamation of the republic, aroused much popular enthusiasm. In principle, the Progressive Republican Party defended liberal democracy and committed itself to a program of laissez-faire economics (Tunçay, 1981, p. 104). While doubts were raised as to the relationship of this party to the then outlawed Committee of Union and Progress, it seemed more in tune than the CUP with a strictly liberal world-view. On the other hand, it soon became an umbrella for a variety of opponents of the Republican regime. Soon afterwards, beneath its pretentiously progressive and republican banners, religious opposition reappeared, as well as provincialism with a Kurdist-cum-Islamist slant, as a reaction to the modernizing and homogenizing attitude of the state, a factor largely responsible for the termination of this embryonic experiment with democracy (Atatürk, 1981, pp. 451–55). The Free Republican Party became the focus of virtually all discontent in the face of the Great Depression then being felt particularly on the primarily export-oriented West Anatolian coastline. It should also be noted that the liberal economic objectives of the opposition parties had been toned down over time in conformity with the exigencies of the economic context.

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inherently and uncompromisingly antidemocratic.17 The Kemalists experimented occasionally with the idea of a multi-party system at a time when multi-party systems in Europe, far from offering an inspiring model, were on the verge of collapse. Whereas the first two experiments with introducing a second party had collapsed precisely because the second party came under the spell of reactionary forces overtly opposed to the modernist foundations of the Republic, by 1950 a third had come to fruition. What had changed in the meantime was not only the international environment, but also the emergence of a political culture under the direction of Kemalist principles that could define secular modernity as the lowest common denominator of competitive politics. The Democrat Party that came to power had emerged from the rank and file of the Republican People’s Party, and belonged essentially to the same political culture, while adopting a much less overtly modernist and less exclusively urban vocabulary that appealed to the bulk of the population still living in the otherwise peripheral countryside (Mardin, 1975, pp. 29–30). A smooth transition was thereby made possible without the need to go outside the parameters of the modernist republican regime. If Kemalism’s openness to democracy was largely responsible for the smooth transition to a multi-party system, there is another prominent factor in the explanation of how democratic politics, despite a number of ups and downs, was able to persist. The most significant factor in explaining Turkish exceptionalism in the survival of democracy is the absence of large land ownership in the rural sector and the persistent predominance of small and medium-sized independent proprietors (Keyder, 1987). Given Turkey’s earlier pattern of industrialization, which relied on a price scissor relocating surplus from agriculture to industry, a vast rural population was more than willing to become the social basis of the democratic–populist transition. As far as the rural masses were concerned, the new competitive political system as a counterpart of the market mechanism was an effective instrument of self-defence. Because of this, Turkey had to invent a formula for political representation without imposing direct taxation on the countryside (Keyder, 1984, p. 18). Hence the ‘one-man, one-vote’ principle came into effect at no addi17

Obviously, Kemalism occasionally also took advantage of the ambiguities of a period of global transformation when the dictionary meaning of ‘democracy’ was subject to a number of attempted revisions. While there is an affinity between republicanism and democracy, Atatürk went too far in insisting in 1933 that republicanism was synonymous with democracy (Afetinan, 1981, p. 164). Notwithstanding such significant exceptions, Atatürk’s overall attitude to the existence of a second party was positive rather than negative (Steinhaus, 1973, p. 113).

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tional cost to the bulk of the population. Had it not been for the coherent articulation of this factor in terms of the import-substituting industrialization strategy, populist democracy may not have lasted long. Although the brief liberal interlude brought immediate prosperity and increased expectations in the countryside, in 1953, after the collapse in world prices for Turkey’s rural exports, combined with a number of bad harvests, the Turkish economy turned inward and sought to deepen its importsubstituting industrialization by putting the emphasis on the private sector in the mixed economy. The public sector was expected to create favorable externalities in order to nurture private enterprise (Boratav, 1990, pp. 85–93). This policy was to continue until the late 1970s, when radical restructuring became unavoidable. Before its hour struck, between 1962 and 1973 Turkey experienced a second phase of exemplary growth, which helped turn it into the ‘archetype of a mixed economy,’ in tune with contemporary realities. The government had once again assumed a leading role, on the one side, by engaging itself in planning and capital formation by means of its own economic enterprises, and, on the other, by creating externalities and incentives for the private sector, a situation somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s (Singer, 1984, p. 163). The 1960s witnessed the perfection of popular democracy in compliance with the needs of the domestic economy. A broader alliance than that of the rural forces was created by including urban social groups experiencing upward mobility in order to secure an expanding market for a rapidly growing manufacturing sector. It was clearly understood that the inward-looking economic development strategy could be sustained only by a regime of strong popular and democratic credentials on a rising purchasing power curve. The two would live together, and, when the time came, collapse together, as they did in 1980. It is no surprise that during the boom of the 1960s Turkey appeared as a latecomer on the path to Europeanization, following the trajectory of the southern European states with a lag of about a decade. It was in this optimistic atmosphere that the Ankara Agreement of 1963, linking Turkey’s prospects to Europe, was signed (Tekeli and I·lkin, 1993, pp. 201–202). It was fashionable to calculate when Turkey would reach the then level of development of Italy, at that time the only southern member of the European Economic Community. Once placed under U. S. hegemony in the postwar era, the similarities between Turkey and the southern European countries gained precedence over those of the structural differences that would prove important in the long term. Most importantly, Portugal and Spain were not yet democracies, while during the decade in question Greece fell under the specter of dictatorship. Hence, when political criteria carried the day in a world of contesting ideologies, Turkey with her multi-party system seemed much closer to the Italian case.

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From the 1960s, Turkey, while preserving its low level of manufactured exports, assumed an added importance, from the standpoint of Europe, as a major exporter of labor. By sending workers abroad, Turkey relieved the pressure of unemployment at home, as well as securing the foreign currency reserves essential for importing technology further to pursue the strategy of import-substituting industrialization. With the oil shock, profit squeeze, balance of payments crisis, and chronic foreign exchange shortage, the import-substituting growth strategy came to a sudden standstill at the end of the 1970s. The crisis served once again to differentiate Turkey from southern Europe: while countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece returned from dictatorship to democracy (Poulantzas, 1976; Logan, 1985) and were reoriented in terms of their developmental strategies towards the European Economic Community, Turkey, despite the displacement of the USA by Germany as its major trading partner, could not participate in this common trend (Keyder, 1987, p. 194). As economic recession took hold in Europe, Turkey’s labor exports became less desirable, while anti-inflationary policies abroad reduced the demand for Turkish manufactured exports that were desperately in search of a foreign market at a time when the domestic market had started to contract because of declining purchasing power. Retrospectively, it is clear that Turkey had made a fresh start in the postwar era that could be characterized as liberal. In conformity with Western trends, Turkey had instituted a multi-party regime and freedom of the press, and brought to power a center–right government that emphasized the rhetoric of liberal rights and prerogatives. Furthermore, once in power, the Democrat Party had adopted policies of economic liberalism. The combined effect of all this might have given the impression of a determined liberal début, yet Turkey staggered onto a populist path once the Korean War, temporarily conducive to Turkey’s agricultural exports, was over. Import-substituting industrialization in tune with the worldwide Keynesianism organized under the hegemony of the United States induced Turkey to retreat from a program of economic liberalism without much hesitation. It was clear that, when it came to regulating the economy, rhetoric was one thing and reality quite another. As the clouds of the Cold War darkened, the center–right government further retreated from liberal political objectives. Turkish society, having remained largely a peasant society with a modest level of industrial transformation, did not in the 1950s display the characteristics of a sharply class-divided society in which political life was organized along the axis of class conflict. Even so, the Democrat Party sought to take advantage of the global crystallization of the right–left conflict, and manipulated political differences to generate open conflict with a resurgent, clandestine left. While the Democrats thereby consolidated their hold on the government apparatus, they suffocated whatever liberal

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breathing space may initially have been created. In this way, the prospects of developing a liberal democratic society were undermined. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that the structural transformation of Turkish society gained enough ground to justify a center-right versus center-left organization of political life. However, the legacy of the 1950s loomed large over the prospects of a modern liberal democracy. If anything, paternalistic and clientistic organizations dominated the political scene and ushered in an era of sharp conflict undermining the lowest common denominator of the regime. The emergence of radical left- and radical right-wing parties changed the scene drastically. Overburdened by a history of feuds, the center-right and center-left refused to cooperate on the basic principles of governance, choosing instead to form alliances with radical fringe parties. The dissatisfaction with a popular import-substituting industrialization that, mainly because of bottlenecks, failed to deliver on its promises, provided a receptive soil for extremist movements on the racist and religious right, as well as on the provisional left. In the end, what was left of an original liberal niche was a formal multi-party democracy plagued with a lack of consensus concerning its worth.

IX. The year 1980 represents a turning-point in the modern history of Turkey. The collapse of civil society coupled with a malfunctioning state apparatus brought the entire process of social formation to a standstill. Under these circumstances, the inevitable military intervention paved the way for the radical restructuring of political life. Constitutional provisions were imposed to exclude the old political establishment from the political process. The extreme parties and organizations of the left and right were, for the time being, eliminated from the political scene. The military regime sought to build up consensus—albeit artificially— at the center of the political spectrum, a strategy that had been so badly needed during the previous era.18

18

The 1980 coup was the third of its kind in Turkish history. Turkish military interventions are distinguished by the fact that, far from initiating breakdown of civil order, they indicate a reflexive response to it. The following conclusion of a study on the military factor deserves consideration: “It appears that, although the army’s twin commitment to guardianship of the state and social and economic modernization may have left it with an ambiguous attitude towards political democracy, the fact that it ensured the survival of the basic state structures was of crucial importance. Without such structures, the development of any sort of political system—democratic or otherwise— would be impossible and pointless” (Hale, 1994, p. 330).

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The changes in the economic realm were no less dramatic. As far as long-term development strategy is concerned, there was a sudden turning away from the import-substituting industrialization model to export-led growth. This was inaugurated as a response to the then insurmountable balance of payments crisis and the foreign debt burden. The shift appeared in a stabilization program distinguished by tight monetary and fiscal policies designed to bring about a reduction in the deficit and a fall in real wages. The reduction of domestic demand helped to encourage industrialists to seek new markets abroad. From 1980, Turkey’s importance vis-à-vis the European Economic Community deteriorated sharply, as a result of the recession in Europe and the new membership of rival countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and also because of the suspension of civil and political rights in Turkey in the aftermath of the 1980 coup. Consequently, Turkey seemed destined to isolation at a moment when what the new economic policy desperately required was to be opened up to the world. As far as relations with the United States were concerned, the outlook improved unexpectedly when a socialist government rhetorically at odds with that country came to power in Greece in 1981. From that time on Greece would be more oriented towards the European Community, at a time when Spain and Portugal were also turning their attention in that direction. Shunned by Europe, Turkey entered into closer partnership with the United States, an orientation which meant that Turkey had to keep its promises of economic liberalization, turning it into a model case for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while it fell short in the area of political liberalism; after all, at the time the United States cared less about human rights and political pluralism than it did about free trade. Shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East provided a further unforeseen opportunity. The fall of the pro-American regime in Iran had already enhanced the value of Turkey from the standpoint of Western security. A major rival of Turkey for regional hegemony was thus eliminated from the scene. By creating an ideological model unacceptable not only to the West, but also to the more moderate regimes of the Middle East, Iran unintentionally helped to make Turkey the desirable Middle Eastern model. As far as the Arab Middle East was concerned, the Camp David Agreements between Egypt and Israel and the subsequent isolation of Egypt from the Arab World created a vacuum in the region in which pragmatism would rapidly replace ideological orthodoxy. For the first time, Turkey’s role in the Western alliance seemed less of a problem to most—if not all—Middle Eastern countries. Last but not least, the Iran–Iraq War put Turkey in an economically advan-

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tageous position.19 Turkey learned, once again, to translate geopolitical advantages into economic benefits, a lesson that may also prove useful in the long term. The military interregnum was brought to an end with a closely watched election in which the Motherland Party won an unexpected majority. Within a few years, political life returned to normal as far as free elections and participation in the political process were concerned. In addition to the newly formed parties, the old political parties and their offshoots re-entered the political scene. In this way Turkey gradually slipped into a chaotic period characterized by the extreme fragmentation of the political center. Nevertheless, before eventually falling victim to this marginalizing process itself, the Motherland Party remained in government for two successive terms, and helped to bring about a major political and economic reorientation. Unlike the traditional state paternalistic rival parties of the center– right and the center–left, the Motherland Party insisted, at least rhetorically, on inverting the relationship between state and society. Private initiative was given priority, and individual rights were emphasized in place of the traditional non-liberal practices of an overarching state. The Motherland Party committed itself to a program of economic liberalization already put into effect under military rule by its own leader, who had served as deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs. It now promised to restructure political life in accordance with traditional liberal values. Furthermore, the Motherland Party sought to reshuffle the right wing of the political spectrum, further reinforced by defections from the left, along an axis of pragmatic renewal. Most importantly, the Motherland Party realistically identified its social and ideological basis in a conservative majority, some members of which felt themselves at odds with the principles of the republic. In a way, the Motherland Party recreated the right in a new form. The new

19

During the critical period 1980–85 the Middle East played a crucial role in the success of Turkey’s new economic policy. By way of export market segmentation, Turkey was able to achieve a less costly re-orientation of its manufacturing sector, built up under the import-substituting policies of the 1960s, the capacity utilization of which had dropped sharply during the recession of 1977–80. Whereas exports to the European Economic Community consisted primarily of unskilled labor-intensive manufactures, 50 per cent of the exports to the Middle East consisted of capital-intensive and two fifths of skilled labor intensive manufactures (ªenses, 1990, 66). The similarity of the commodity structure of Turkey’s Middle Eastern trade to that of the European Community and the concomitant competition also put Turkey at odds with Europe.

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right was supposed to be economically and technologically modernist, and morally conservative. With its careful choice of the term ‘conservative,’ the Motherland Party leadership sent a signal to the dormant religious forces that have always felt uncomfortable with the secular pillars of the republican regime. At a time when the Turkish economy was increasingly coming into contact with the Middle East and relations with Europe remained cold, this resurgence of a mild Islamism was not without major consequences. Whereas before 1980 a Pan-Turkist tendency with racial overtones far outweighed its religious fundamentalist counterpart within the radical right, in the post-1983 scene the positions were reversed. Furthermore, a mild Islam under the banner of a multiparty system had some appeal for the United States, searching as it was for a marketable model for the Middle East. The restoration of a multi-party system in Turkey in 1983, together with the improvement of economic conditions in the European Economic Community, reinvigorated reciprocal interest. Moreover, with the collapse of oil prices in 1985, the Middle Eastern demand for Turkish manufactures was reduced. Turkey could therefore return to its traditional markets in developed countries with the added advantage of having ‘learned by doing,’ an advantage acquired during the Middle Eastern episode of Turkey’s recent political economic restructuring. Precisely because Turkey had more or less successfully instituted a multi-party regime in the post-war period, the problem of liberalization in Turkey was posed primarily in economic terms.20 What was being debated in Turkey was a technical question of cost-competitiveness and efficiency. Largely because of its historical political heritage embodied in a state tradition, Turkey has had an advantage as far as its ability to adapt to a new political economy is concerned. To a certain extent, the Turkish economy fared well and managed to operate within a competitive environment, making good use of regional opportunities, giving legitimacy to a political trend in which the reduction of the scope of the state created room for the eventual spread of reactionary religious social forces. The paradox was that, at a time when the strength of an insurgent private enterprise economy and developmental momentum propelled an export-oriented Turkey towards closer ties with the European Community and the modern world in general, political forces were being 20

The proliferation of the literature on liberalization in the Middle East attests to what happens when liberalization comes on the agenda without the prior institution of a multi-party system (Barkey, 1992; Harik and Sullivan, 1992; Niblock and Murphy, 1993). With the vested interest of a single-party state in commanding the economy, the picture is further complicated not only in the Middle East, but in the former Eastern Bloc countries where liberalization is as much a political problem as it is an economic one.

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systematically cultivated that would obstruct this trend at the ideological level. With the coming to power in 1997 of the politically religious Welfare Party as the major partner in the coalition government, despite having obtained only 20 per cent of the total vote, one of the taboos of the Republican era was cast to the ground. Until then, political compromises had always been worked out within the framework of the existing political institutional setup, excluding the overtly religious reaction to the secular and modernist regime. With the Welfare Party, which openly opposed the principle of secular governance, the forces of religious reaction had finally found a political voice within the political structure. However, far from being the expression of just another point of view within the parameters of pluralistic democracy, the Welfare Party contested the very existence of the current political order. While casting itself in the mold of the Christian Democratic parties of Europe, the Welfare Party was in fact inclined to put into effect a single-party system more in tune with the regimes of the Middle East. In any case, according to the Welfare Party, Europe was a ‘Christian Club’ in which Turkey had no place. Relying on support from Middle Eastern regimes that have always seen a potential threat in the existence of a secular democracy in Turkey, the Welfare Party was devoted to the cause of undermining secularism and recasting politics on the basis of Islam. According to the Welfare Party, which was itself a product of modernity, the ‘Other,’ as far as popular Turkish identity was concerned, ought to have been Europe as the most immediately threatening element of the West, while the national self-image should have been cast in terms of Islam rather than the Turkish nation. At least at the level of political rhetoric, the Welfare Party pretended to represent the ‘revolt of the masses’ against the infiltration of an alien modernity under the protection of the Republic. Since then, the Welfare Party has been ousted from office and subsequently shut down by the Constitutional Court, only to be replaced by a variety of seemingly milder religious parties. This does not affect much in substance, however. The problem with Islam is that it entails a particular social and political order and legal framework, as well as an ethical and religious code designed for the religious needs of the individual. In an orthodox interpretation it is irreconcilable with a pluralistic political system. Over the last decade, rekindled by the winds of postmodernism, the principle of modernity has come under attack not only in Turkey, but also in the wider world (Gellner, 1992; Ahmed, 1992).21 The question of Islam’s compatibility with pluralistic democracy 21

The birth of a group of Islamic intellectuals who have sought to interpret modernity through the lens of Islam rather than Islam through that of modernity is a case in point (Toprak, 1993).

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has been reopened in this context.22 Within Turkey, a supposedly postmodern liberal attitude that tolerates all kinds of political views—including political fundamentalism—has gained ground, while modernism has retreated. Turkey has now come to a crossroads: a turn will have to be taken either towards modernity, entailing the preservation of a century-long development, or towards an irresponsible political pluralism which will eventually fall prey to the authoritarian fundamentalism of the religious right. While, in terms of the first option, the religious right may eventually find itself forced to concede and thereby become a part of the political establishment, in the second scenario, the eventual revival of modernity or of political democracy is highly unlikely. A liberal democracy without recourse to modernity, especially within the framework of Islam, has not yet been witnessed anywhere on earth. On the other hand, there are quite a few examples of peripheral modernity paving the way for democratization.23 The most important issue in this critical era is whether Turkey will witness the institutional restructuring of its regime in tune with its century-long inheritance in accordance with the wishes of the 80 per cent of the electorate who have so far rejected the religious right. Fortunately, such a decision at this critical juncture is not solely made by the config22

Despite ongoing revisionism which has cast the politics of Islam in the light of new anthropological approaches that emphasize its inherent flexibility in the invention of traditions and social practices in response to a changing environment (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996), no convincing argument has yet been put forward to demonstrate that within the realm of religious politics this inventiveness can go so far as to generate a pluralistic democracy from within. Apart from institutional divergence, even at the level of intellectual formulations Islamist parallelism with liberal democracy leaves much to be desired, as indicated in the following observation of a sympathetic scholar: “Moderate fundamentalist thinkers are not, of course, Western liberal democrats in the strict sense; however, they are indeed liberal and democratic enough in a context like the Middle East, which is plagued with nationalist totalitarian rules and traditional despotic kings” (Moussalli, 1995, p. 118). 23 In a sense, the very founding of the republic in Turkey imposed a fundamental choice between liberal pluralism and a commitment to full-fledged modernity. The prominent Turkish liberals Halide Edib-Adıvar and her husband Adnan Adıvar who had actively endorsed the Turkish War of Independence and then chose to go into voluntary exile in the United States were well aware of this dilemma. Nevertheless, Halide Edib-Adıvar conceded that political independence could survive without liberties for a while, tacitly acknowledging that the opposite was less likely (Edib-Adıvar, 1962, p. 309). It is also noteworthy that Edib-Adıvar, who persistently defined herself as a liberal, chose to qualify the Kemalist forces fighting the War of Independence as “nationalists” (Edib-Adıvar, 1962, p. 47).

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uration of local forces. Just as the surge of political Islam in Turkey has been part and parcel of a general convergence with the Middle East, the changing world order has helped to create a series of new factors. The demise of the Soviet Empire has given birth to a multiplicity of Turkic states that look to Turkey as the model for a secular nation-state with a market economy, just as the revival of the Black Sea world has attracted Turkey’s attention. Insofar as the independence of the Turkic states inspires the Pan-Turkist extremist wing, it also gives buoyancy to this main opponent of religious fundamentalism within the extreme right. In any case, at a time when confidence in national identity is riding the tide, as manifested in the last general election, a religious identity with Arab and Iranian colorings may seem less desirable.24 Both the Black Sea world and the Central Asian Republics share with Turkey a choice in favor of secularism and pluralism, as well as a deep interest in the West in general and in Europe in particular. This should be more than able to offset the pull of the Middle East and to help bring Turkey and Europe closer together. In the final analysis, internal forces will play a crucial role in determining the course Turkey eventually follows. One major factor that had cast a shadow over Turkey’s relations with Europe had been the so-called Kurdish insurgency that escalated into violence after 1980; not only did this jeopardize the chances of democratic governance, but it strained Turkey’s relations with Europe and other neighboring countries. Albeit changing its form, this problem has a number of dimensions. On the one side, there is the willingness of neighboring countries to instigate revolt in order to increase their influence over the determination of regional disputes and conflicts. On the other side, there is the problem of regional development: southeast Turkey remains the most backward region in the country. The fact that Kurds inhabit this particular area complicates the problem further, and gives it an important ethnic coloring. Because the majority of Kurds have left their traditional homeland and now live dispersed as a numerical minority in major metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, a separatist solution could create more problems than it might solve. Historically, Kurdish identity has been gradually built up in reaction to the nation-state project in Turkey. Under the Ottoman Empire, ethnic Kurds and ethnic Turks were conceived first and foremost as Muslims and Ottomans. Under the Republic, a nation of Turks without recourse to ethnicity or race as definitive attributes was deliberately created. For the Turks, who gave up one identity for another, to 24

The bankruptcy of political Islam witnessed in the attempts of neighboring countries to come to terms with the real problems facing Middle Eastern societies (Roy, 1992) may further take the wind out of the sails of the Turkish religious right.

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which they were not the least related in their minds, it seemed natural to expect other ethnic groups to do the same. However, to tribal Kurdish groups this seemed like a concession. Hence, during the first decade of the Republic they reacted in the name of Islam, the common denominator of identities, while from the 1970s they sought to develop their own ethnic version of a modern nationalistic identity (Bruinessen, 1992). It should not be forgotten that, with the separatist movement failing to deliver its promises amidst successive heavy military defeats, Kurdish constituencies readily turned in large numbers to the Islamist Welfare Party, thereby providing the backbone of an antimodern, anti-European political movement. Given the existing demographic situation, the search for political identities other than those of constitutional citizenship will not serve any desirable end in the near future. The artificial prolongation of this conflict will, however, further jeopardize the chances of democratic government in Turkey and the improvement of its relations with Europe. It should be noted that Turkey’s participation in a united Europe could help alleviate this problem precisely because a supranational identity could serve, as Islam once did, as a basis for more harmonious social relations. This means that the full resolution of the problem is realistically to be expected to take place after Turkey’s accession to European Union, and not before, as the EU insists. If the Kurdish question as it stands puts a brake on Turkey’s future in Europe, another legacy of the Republic improves the country’s chances of resisting the Islamist tide and resuming its long-standing modernist orientation. During the prolonged state of warfare from which the Republic emerged, the demographic composition of the country was drastically altered. As many men died and others were mobilized for years at a time, women in Turkey came to substitute men in important social functions (Dog˘ramacı, 1989, pp. 144–45). As early as 1921, a feminist organization demanded the right to take part in general elections, not only as voters, but also as candidates (Çakır, 1991, p. 311). Shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, women’s rights were recognized as part and parcel of the general modernization program.25 The cultivation of a female sense of identity and equality with men outside the domestic sphere provided one of the distinctive cornerstones of the Turkish path to modernity. The resistance of women to the curbing of their long-recognized rights is likely to remain one of the most important stumbling blocks in the way of

25

The introduction of reforms from above has led some to wrongly underestimate the role of the female popular struggle. Even so, a consensus exists concerning the impact of these reforms, however debatable the degree of this impact might be (Kandiyoti, 1997).

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the Islamists. The same force will continue to exert an influence in favor of a commitment to modernity. It should be remembered that when Turkey embarked on its course, Europe was synonymous with modernity. Now Europe is only one example among several possible instances of modernity in the world. Hence it would be wrong to assume that Turkey’s choice in favor of modernity will necessarily overlap with the destiny of a united Europe. The final outcome will depend as much on the strategic vision or shortsightedness of Europe—of which history presents a number of examples—as on what Turkey does at this important crossroads. Turkey may well cope with the obstacles in its way and preserve its direction in favor of a liberal modernity with national colorings, yet pass up its historic rendezvous with Europe.

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List of Contributors

IVÁN ZOLTÁN DÉNES Debrecen University—István Bibó Center for Advanced Studies, Budapest DANIEL BARBU University of Bucharest GÁBOR ERDÔDY Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest RICHARD J. FINLAY Strathclyde University, Glasgow VILMOS HEISZLER Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest MACIEJ JANOWSKI Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw MIKLÓS KUN Károli Gáspár University of the Hungarian Reformed Church, Budapest DAVID MCCRONE Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh DIANA MISHKOVA Center for Advanced Study, Sofia EYÜP ÖZVEREN Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara JANET POLASKY University of New Hampshire, Durham CHRISTIAN PREDA University of Bucharest IMRE RESS Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest ALEXANDER SEMYONOV Smolny College, St. Petersburg State University MIKLÓS SZABÓ (1935–2000) Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest ALBERT TANNER University of Bern OTTO URBAN (1938–1996) Charles University, Prague HENK TE VELDE Leiden University

Index of Names

Abdülhamid II [Sultan], 467, 468 Acton, John Emerich, Edward Dalberg-Acton, Lord of, 240 Adıvar, Adnan, 492 Aerts, Remieg, 61, 63 Afetinan, Afet, 477, 483 Ahmad, Feroz, 458, 481 Ahmed Midhat Effendi, 464 Ahmed, Akbar S., 491 Akçura,Yusuf, 474 Alexander I, 247, 249, 312–19, 323, 324, 326 Allison, Archibald, 43 Allmayer-Beck, Johann Christoph, 140, 164 Anderson, Benedict, 59, 109, 330, 331, 462 Anderson, Robert Davis, 41, 44 Andrian-Werburg, Victor, 142, 160, 161 Apponyi, Albert, 230, 233 Apponyi, György, 171, 179 Argyll, (Eighth) Duke of, 45 Arıkan, Zeki, 474 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 477, 483, 484 Auerswald, Rudolf Ludwig Cäsar, 93 Bach, Alexander, 142, 143, 205, 219 Bacon, Francis, 250 Badie, Bertrand, 370 B¥lcescu, Nicolae, 380, 436–39, 442, 443, 448, 449 Balza, Alexandre, 80 Bánffy, Dezsô, 232 Banti, Alberto Mario, 373 Barbu, Daniel, xv, 10, 367, 375, 379

Barkey, Henri, 490 Barkey, Karen, 333 B¥rnuµiu, Simion, 380 B¥sescu, Traian, 387, 389 Bastiat, Frederic, 359 Batthyány, Lajos, 160, 168, 181 Baumgarten, Herrmann, 97, 100 Becker, Herrmann, 97 Begg, Rev. James, 39 Belcredi, Richard, 299 Benedikt, Heinrich, 146 Benningsen, Karl Wilhelm Rudolf, 105 Bentham, Jeremy, 6, 180, 185, 207, 314 Berkes, Niyazi, 475, 483 Berlin, Isaiah, xiii, xv, 170, 173, 187 Bermeo, Nancy, 370 Biagini, Eugenio, F., 37, 38, 56, 69 Bibó, István, xvi, 6, 174, 177, 215 Birgen, Muhittin, 474 Berzeviczy, Gergely, 158 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 96, 98, 99–105, 128, 236, 381 Bochmann, Klaus, 377 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen, 146 Boileau, Nicolas, 251 Bölöni, Farkas Sándor, 197 Bonin, Gustav, 95 Boratav, Korkut, 481, 485 Botez, Sorin, 383 Bourgoin, Marguerite, 477 Bráf, Albín, 292, 293 Br¥tianu, Ion C., 369–71, 377, 378, 381, 386, 392, 394, 440, 441, 444, 446, 449, 450–52

504

Index of Names

Br¥tianu, Ion Ionel. C., 373, 376, 379, 381, 382 Breuilly, John, 38 Bright, John, 38, 51 Brill, W. G., 63 Brom, Gerard, 70 Brown, Callum, 41 Brown, Stewart J., 41 Brown, Victoria F., 377, 400, 440, 446 Bruck, Karl Ludwig, 144 Bruinessen, Martin van, 494 Brusatti, Alois, 146 Bulei, Ion, 371, 377 Cahnan, Werner J., 141 Çakır, Serpil, 494 Cameron, Ewen, 51 Câmpeanu, Radu, 386, 391, 392 Caragiale, Ioan L., 386 Carey, William, 256 Carlyle, Thomas, 44 Carol II, King of Romania, 368 Carp, Petre P., 372, 376, 445 Carp, Radu, 390 Çavdar, Tevfik, 464, 467 Cavit Bey, 464, 468, 469 Cavour, Camillo Benso, 97 Cazimir, Stefan, 385 Ceauºescu, Nicolae, 383 Cerveni, Niculae, 385, 386 Cevdet Pasha, 478 Charmatz, Richard, 142, 144, 145 Chicherin, Boris, 336 Cieszkowski, August, 252, 253, 255, 265 Ciorbea, Victor, 387 Ciuceanu, Radu, 384 Cockburn, Henry, 25, 40 Constant, Benjamin, 5, 6, 170, 219, 250, 311, 315, 326 Cornea, Paul, 377 Costa Pinto, Antonio, 370 Costache Epureanu, Manolache, 371 Cr¥iuµu, Aurelian, 391 ∂ubrilovi∆, Vasa, 346, 358 Curtius, Donker, 61, 62 Cuza, Alexandru Ioan, 374, 380, 381, 439, 445 Czeike, Felix, 149

Darwin, Charles, 258 Davies, Norman, 38 Davison, Roderic H., 466, 467 Deák, Ágnes, 170 Deák, Ferenc, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 173–77, 209, 210, 214, 218, 224, 225, 227, 229 De Potter, Louis, 82, 83, 86 De Waele, Jean-Michel, 388 Delors, Jacques, 394 Delwit, Pascal, 388 De Maistre, Joseph, 187 Demény, Ludovic, 392 Demirel, Ahmet, 483 Demolins, Edmond, 469 Dénes, Iván Zoltán, 38, 162–64, 169–71, 179, 181–83 Deringil, Selim, 480 Dessewffy, Aurél, 163, 164, 171, 182, 184 Dessewffy, Emil, 178, 180 Devine, Thomas, Martin, 40, 47 Dmowski, Roman, 262, 263 Dobrogeanu Gherea, Constantin, 371, 372 Dogˇ ramacı, Emel, 493 Donker, D., 60, 62 d’Outrepont, Charles Lambert, 76 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 100 Drucki-Lubecki, Franciszek Ksawery, 249 Dufour, Henri Guillaume, 125 Duncker, Max, 95, 97 Dunin, Karol, 268 Dworkin, Ronald, 4 Dyer, Michael, 37 Edib-Adıvar, Halide, 473, 474, 492 Eickelman, Dale F., 492 Enescu, Nicolae, 383 Eötvös, József, 166, 169, 170, 173, 177, 180, 205, 206, 211, 212 Eötvös Károly, 314 Erdôdy, Gábor, xiii, 9, 167, 181 Feller, Abbé de, 79 Fellner, Fritz, 144 Ferdinand I, 159 Ferdinand III, 198

Index of Names Ferguson, Adam, 23 Finlay, Richard, xiv, 9, 37, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52 Fischer-Galati, Stephen, 336 Fischhof, Adolf, 142 Flora, Peter, 374, 382 Forckenbeck, Max, 97 Foucault, Michel, 376 Francis, Joseph, 92, 145, 147, 198, 205 Franz, Georg, 142 Fraser, W. Hamis, 40 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 125 Fri∑, Jozef Václav, 305 Friedjung, Heinrich, 143, 144 Fruin, Robert, 60, 61, 63, 65–67 Frunze, Mikhail Vasilyevich, 474 Fry, Michael, 37, 38, 41 Fuchs, Albert, 148 Gall, Lothar, 68, 91 Gane, Constantin, 372, 376, 381, 448 Ga‡asanin, Ilija, 405 Garibaldi, Guiseppe, 37, 200 Geist-Lányi, Paula, 143 Gellner, Ernest, 330, 331, 458, 491 Gentz, Friedrich, 188 George III. King of England, 374 Georgescu, Vlad, 375, 436, 442, 443, 447 Gergely, András, 163, 167, 169, 170, 175, 181 Gladstone, William Ewart, 28, 38, 50, 69 Gökalp, Ziya, 474 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 383 Gottfried, Georg, 99 Grégr, Eduard, 302 Grégr, Julius, 302 Guizot, François, 56, 61, 68, 451 Grujic, Jevrem, 405, 406, 408, 409, 417 Gugel, Michael, 99 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 149 Hajnóczy, József, 158, 177 Hale, William, 487 Hálek, Vit±zslav, 302

505

Haller, Karl Ludwig von, 187 Hamann, Brigitte, 150 Hamilton, Alexander, 243 Hanham, Harold J., 40, 42 Haniogˇ lu, M. ªükrü, 463, 468 Hantsch, Hugo, 144 Hardenberg, Karl August, 462 Harik, Iliya, 490 Haselsteiner, Horst, 350 Havlí∑ek, Karel 280, 281, 290, 291, 294, 296 Hayek, Friedrich, 150, 267 Hayen, Rudolf, 105 Heiszler Vilmos, xiii, 10 Henry VIII, 198 Herder, Johann G., 173, 174, 285, 393 Hirschman, Albert O., 383 Hirst, Francis W., 463 Hobbes, Thomas, 242 Hobsbawm, Eric. J., 122, 330, 331, 458, 461 Hohenwart, Karl, 299 Honecker, Erich, 384 Hornby, Edmund, 467 Hottinger, Johann Jakob, 128 Hourani, Albert, 464, 468, 469, 471 Hroch, Miroslav, 6, 110, 119 Hume, David, 23 Huoranszki, Ferenc, xiii Hus, Jan 291 Hussák, Gustav, 383 Hutchison, Ian, 37, 38, 43, 47, 52 Iliescu, Adrian-Paul, 391 Ilincioiu, Ion, 391 I·lkin, Selim, 473, 485 Ionescu Alexandra, 386 Ionescu-Quintus, Mircea, 390, 391 Iosa, Mircea, 373, 374, 376, 378, 381, 382, 391 Is¥rescu, Mugur, 386 James VII and II, 22 Jankovi∆, Milovan, 405, 409 Janos, Andrew C., 375 Janowski, Maciej, xiii, 10, 181, 434 Jászi, Oszkár, 3, 161 Jay, John, 243

506

Index of Names

Jeffrey, Francis, 25 Jela∑i∆, Josip, 143 Jeremias, Gotthelf, 118 Jerkov, Miroslav, 347, 350–55 Jivkov, Todor, 383 John, Archduke, 142 Joseph II., 76, 198, 209, 212, 276 Jósika, Samu, 171, 179 Jovanovi∆, Vladimir, 345, 357–64, 404–06, 408–13, 418, 425, 441, 442 Jovanovi∆, Milo≥, 347 Jovanovi∆, Slobodan, 404 Jung, Georg, 97 Jungmann, Jozef, 277 Kahan, Alan S., 377, 381 Kaizl, Jozef 292, 303 Kállay, Ferenc, 182–84 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 494 Kann, Robert. A., 141, 142, 150 Karavelov, Lyuben, 414, 423, 424–29, 445 Karpat, Kemal H., 466 Kazinczy, Ferenc, 158 Kecskeméthy, Aurél, 219, 220, 223, 227–29 Kemény, G. Gábor, 347, 351, 353 Kemény, Zsigmond, 166, 205–07, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 227 Keszthelyi, András, xiii Keyder, Çagˇ lar, 458, 465, 479, 484, 486 Kidd, Colin, 39 Kis, János, xv, 1, 4, 162, 177 Kocka, Jürgen, 68, 373 Kohn, Hans, 109, 112, 124, 126, 333 Köker, Levent, 478, 483 Kölcsey, Ferenc, 160, 162, 163, 173, 176 Ko°°Ωtaj, Hugo, 243, 244, 248 Kolmer, Gustav, 146 Kossuth, Lajos, 39, 159–68, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 181, 185, 186, 204, 206, 209–13, 222–224, 226 Kostis, Kostas, 403 Kramáfi, Karel, 303 Kruger, K., 482

Kun, Miklós, xiii, 10 Kuruç, Bilsay, 481 Kymlicka, Will, xv, 1, 329, 337 Lamey, August, 96 Lampe, John R., 371 Langewiesche, Dieter, 68, 91 L¥z¥rescu Dan. A., 383, 391, 392 Lelewel, Joachim, 239 Leontovich, Viktor, 307–09, 331 Leopold I., Emperor, 198 Leopold, Lajos, 235 Le Play, Frédéric, 469 Lepetit, Bernard, 380 Lewis, Bernard, 469, 478 Lewis, George, 40 Libelt, Karol, 252, 253 Linz, Juan J., 372 List, Friedrich, 6, 210, 255 Livingstone, David, 44 Locke, John, 240, 250, 251 Logan, John R., 486 Lukács, György, 141 Lukács, Móric, 211 Macaulay, Thomas, 47 Mackie, John Beveridge, 43, 45, 49, 50 Madison, James, 243 Maiorescu, Titu, 369, 370, 371, 373, 375, 380, 446 Maklakov, Vasilii, 311, 334 Manent, Pierre, 394 Manolescu, Nicolae, 391 Manteuffel, Otto von, 93 Mardin, ªerif, 460, 464, 470, 484 Maria Theresa, 76, 198, 209, 212, 276 Markovi∆, Svetozar, 361 Masaryk, Tomá≥ Garrigue, 284, 291, 292, 303, 304 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 39, 118 McLaren, Duncan, 41, 43, 49, 51 McCrone, David, xiv, 9, 44 Medina Lockhart, Pablo, 388 Metternich-Winneburg, Clemens Lothar, 92, 142, 167, 168, 169, 172, 181, 209, 212, 276, 277 Michael the Brave, (Prince of Wallachia), 380

Index of Names Mickiewicz, Adam, 252 Midhat Pasha, 477 Mileti∆, Svetozar, 345–347, 347–56, 358 Mili∑evi∆, Jovan, 358, 361 Miliukov, Pavel, 311, 332, 334–36, 338–41 Mill, John Stuart, 87, 258, 259, 293, 337, 424 Mishkova, Diana, xv, 10, 403 Mitchell, Allan, 373 Mitchison, Rosalind, 38 Mitrovi∆, Andrej, 356 Molisch, Paul, 143, 148 Mommsen, Wolfgang J., 97 Montesquieu, Charles Louis Secondat de, 6, 180, 185, 187, 188, 203, 217, 426 Morar, Filon, 390 Morris, Robert John, 40 Morton, Graeme, 39, 42 Mosca, Gaetano, 204, 376 Moussalli, Ahmad S., 492 Mouzelis, Nicos P., 372 Muhammed Ali Pasha [of Egypt], 462 Muravyov, Nikolai, 317, 322, 323, 325, 326 Murphy, Emma, 490 Müller, Adam, 187, 188 Müller, Felix, 133 Müller, Margit, 25 Nairn, Tom, 39 Napoleon, I., 59, 117, 174, 180, 244–247, 313–15, 317, 321, 324, 463 Naruszewicz, Adam, 239 N¥stase, Adrian, 387, 389 Naumoviç, Slobodan, 420 Negulici, Ioan D., 378 Neruda, Jan, 302 Neuhaus, Charles, 120 Niblock, Tim, 490 Niemojowski, Bonawentura, 249 Niemojowski, Wincenty, 249, 251 Nord, Philip, 370 Novosiltsev, Nikolai, 315, 316, 319, 322, 323

507

Önsoy, Rıfat, 463 Oppenheim, Abraham, 97 Orleanu, Mihail, 372 Orlov, Nikolai, 323 Özbudun, Ergun, 482 Özveren, Eyüp, xiv, 10, 465 Palack§, Franti≥ek, 204, 280, 281, 285–87, 291, 294 299, 303 Pamuk, ªevket, 465 Pasi∑, Nikola, 420 Patapievici, Horia-Roman, 391 Patow, Robert von, 93 Patriciu, Dinu, 385, 391 Perseil, Sonny, 384 Pestel, Pavel, 317, 321–24 Petrovi∆, Nikola, 347, 350 Phillipson, Nicholas, 41 Pirili, Mustafa, 464 Piscatori, James, 492 Platon, Gheorghe, 434 Plener, Ernst, 144 Pocock, J.G.A., 374, 376 Pocock, John, 330, 331, 333, 334, Polanyi, Karl, 470 Polasky, Janet, xiv, 9 Policrat, René-Radu, 391 Polith-[Desan∑i∆], Michael [Mihailo], 353 Popescu-T¥riceanu, C¥lin, 387 Popovici, Alexandru, 385, 448 Porter, Brian A., 379, 401 Potocki, Stanis°aw Kostka, 248, 250 Poulantzas, Nicos, 486 Poumay, Jacques, 379 Preda, Cristian, xv, 10, 367, 382, 391, 392 Preradovich, Nikolaus, 140, 148 Prinsterer, Guillaume Groen van, 58 Prodanoviç, Jasa, 405 Pulszky, Ferenc, 161, 173, 177, 180 Puryear, Vernon John, 463 Quataert, Donald, 465 Radeni∆, Andrija, 348 Radetzky, Joseph, 142, 143 Rádl, Emmanuel, 3, 204

508

Index of Names

R¥dulescu-Zoner, Serban, 368, 391, 442 Rae, Douglas, 388 Raeff, Marc, 332 Rath, Joseph, 143 Rau, Karl, 359 Redlich, Joseph, 142, 144, 161 Renan, Ernest, 59, 109, 110, 120 Ress, Imre, xiii, 10 Révai, József, 201 Rieger, Franti≥ek Ladislav, 280–82, 294, 299, 302 Risti∆, Jovan, 358 Robertson, William, 23 Roger, Noëlle, 477 Roggenbach, Franz von, 96 Rokkan, Stein, 374, 381 Roman, Petre, 387 Romanowicz, Tadeusz, 262 Roon, Albrecht Theodor Emil von, 95 Roscher, Wilhelm, 359 Rosetti, Constantin A., 381, 445, 449 Roy, Olivier, 493 Rudolph, Archduke, 150 Rusu, Horia, 391 Rzewuski, Seweryn, 240, 243 Sabahattin, Prince, 469 Sabina, Karel, 281, 294 Saint Stephen, King of Hungary, 347 Sakızlı Ohannes Pasha, 464, 468 Savigny, Friedrich, Karl, 187, 188 Sayar, Ahmed Güner, 464 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 252 Schiller, Friedrich, 141 Schmerling, Anton, 142–45, 149, 297, 298 Schmitt, Carl, 379 Scott, Sir Walter, 40, 44 Schulze von Delitzsch, Herrmann, 97–99, 110 Schumpeter, Joseph, 462 Schwarzenberg, Felix, 143, 144, 295 Shipov, 311 Selek, Sabahattin, 475 Semmel, Bernard, 463 Semyonov, Alexander, 10 ªenses, Fikret, 489 Seyfettin, Ömer, 474

Shaw, Stanford Jay, 463 Sheehan, James J., xv, 68, 91 Singer, Morris, 485 Skinner, Quentin, 186, 331 Sladkovsk§, Karel, 281, 294, 302 Slaveykov, Petko R., 414–423, 427–32, 445, 448 Smith, Adam, 6, 23, 255 Somogyi Éva, 144 Spencer, Herbert, 234, 258, 259, 268, 293, 359 Speransky, Mikhail, 312–15, 322, 323 Spira, György, 348 Staël, Madame de, 6, 312 Stan Apostol, 373, 374, 376, 378, 381, 382, 391, 443 Stan, Valeriu, 379 Stanislaus, Augustus, 239, 241 Staszic, Stanis°aw, 242, 243 Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl, 462 Steinhaus, Kurt, 484 Stere, Constantin, 374 Stoica, Valeriu, 385, 391, 393, 394 Stojan∑evi∆, Vladimir, 358 Stojkovi∆, Andrija 358, 360, 361, 363 Stokes, Gale, 358, 359, 410, 412 Stolojan, Theodor, 387 Stratford de Redcliff, Lord of, 467 Sturdza, Dimitrie A., 381 Struve, Pyotr, 311, 341 Sullivan, Denis J., 490 Suboti∑, Milan, 409, 411–13 Supi≈ski, Józef, 254–57, 268 S´wi¡tochowski, Alexander, 261, 264 Szabó, Miklós, xiii, xv, 10 Szacki, Jerzy, 242, 268 Szalay, László, 180, 211 Szécsen, Antal, 178, 183 Széchenyi, István, 162–64, 168–70, 173, 175, 176, 179, 186, 188, 189, 207–13, 224, 226 Szekfû, Gyula, 170, 189, 201 Szemere, Bertalan, 179 Szilágyi, Imre, xiv Taaffe, Eduard, 148, 300, 301 Tamir,Yael, xv, 1, 162, 329

Index of Names T¥nase, Stelian, 391 T¥utul, Ionic¥, 377 Tavares de Almeida, Pedro, 370 Tekeli, I·lhan, 473, 485 Tengirºenk,Yusuf Kemal, 464 Te Velde, Henk, x, 9, 59, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70 Tezel,Yahya Sezai, 479 Tezner, Friedrich, 142 Thatcher, Margaret, 30, 31 Thorbecke, Johan Rudolf, 58, 61, 62, 66 Thim, József, 348 Timur, Taner, 478 Tisza, István, 232, 235 Tisza, Kálmán, 214, 221–26, 229 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 6, 170, 174, 175, 203 Toprak, Binnaz, 491 Toprak, Zafer, 464, 469, 474 Trefort, Ágoston, 180, 211 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 103 Trencsényi, Balázs, xiv, xv Troxler, Ignaz, Paul Vital, 120 Trubetskoy, Prince, 311 Tunaya, Tarık Zafer, 471 Tunçay, Mete, 473, 483 Turgenev, Nikolai, 319, 321–23, 326 Twesten, August Detlev Christian, 97, 99 Unruh, Hans Victor von, 97 Urban, Otto, xiii, xv, 10 Urquhart, David, 463 Uzer, Tahsin, 473 Ülken, Hilmi Ziya, 469, 478 V¥c¥roiu, Nicolae, 389 V¥itoianu, Arthur, 382

509

Valjavec, Fritz, 141 Van der Noot, Henri, 78, 79, 81 Van Eupen, Pierre, 79 Vandermotten, Christian, 388 Vasile, Radu, 387 Velidedeogˇ lu, Hıfzı Veldet, 482 Verlooy, Jan Baptiste, 78, 85, 86 Vermes, Gábor, xv Vico, Giambattista, 252 Vincke, Georg von, 97 Virchow, Rudolf, 93, 97 Voicu-Jiquidi, Andreea, 390 Vojvodi∆, Vaso, 356 Vonck, Jan François, 78 Vosganian, Varujan, 393 Voynikov, D., 420 Vyazemsky, Pyotr, 315, 316, 322 Waldeck, Franz Leo Benedikt, 97 Weber, Max, 253 Weisband, Edward, 476 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 330, 331 W¡grzecki, Stanislaw, 247, 249 Wekerle, Sándor, 229, 230, 232 Wesselényi, Miklós, 158–60, 162, 163, 165–68, 172–77, 179, 183, 207, 209, 224 Wilhelmina, Queen, 65 William I, 60, 61, 64, 82, 83 William, Frederik IV., 94, 252 Windischgraetz, Alfred, 143 Winkler, Heinrich August, 262 Winter, Eduard, 141 Withrington, Donald, 40 Zachar József, 145 Zhinzifov, Rajko, 420 Zschokke, Heinrich, 121 Zürcher, Erik Jan, 458, 473 Zweig, Stefan, 457